Use jq to get a list of deeply nested values from JSON

I needed the list of extensions from the extensions.json that looks like this:

[
  {
    "identifier": { "id": "asvetliakov.vscode-neovim" },
    "version": "1.18.22",
    ...
  },
  ...
]

I hadn’t used jq before but knew this was exactly what it was made for.

In this case all I needed was this:

jq '.[].identifier.id' extensions.json

Also they have a pretty cool Playground for experimenting or running one-off queries.