Parsing JSON using 'cut' and 'awk' and 'sed' sounds like the jankiest thing ever. Sure, maybe you get it working, after much pain. Then someone decides to form

Parsing JSON using 'cut' and 'awk' and 'sed' sounds like the jankiest thing ever. Sure, maybe you get it working, after much pain. Then someone decides to format your input JSON a bit differently, and everything fails catastrophically. This is the same problem described in the infamous answer "You can't parse [X]HTML with regex": https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open... (Now, if you've been caught in a time-travel accident, and if you must parse JSON using classic Unix tools, consider using lex and yacc. They are sufficiently powerful to do the job correctly.)