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Accepted
Michael Martinez
Asked: 2016-10-05 10:11:20 +0800 CST

How to tell jq to print the content of two keys for each instance returned by aws ec2 cli

  • 772

running aws ec2 describe-instances will return a json text similar to the following:

{
    "Reservations": [
        {
            "Instances": [
                  "PublicDnsName": "ec2..."
                    "VpcId": "vpc-...",
                        ...
            "Instances": [

I know for each "Instance" I can extract the contents of a single field, for example PublicDnsName, using jq as follows: jq '.Reservations[].Instances[].PublicDnsName' which will list the dns names for my instances But how do I extract two or more fields and separate them by a space or comma or something? I want PublicDnsName and VpcId to be listed side-by-side for each Instance.

Specifically what I'm looking for is a list of instances where VpcId is null, undefined, or non-existent. In other words I'd like a list of my Classic instances and I need this through api so I can process the results.

amazon-ec2 json

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Here is an approach using some sample code and data from my answer to a similar question on Stack Overflow.

    To choose multiple fields you can use Object Construction. E.g this filter makes an object containing just PublicDnsName and VpcId from each instance:

      .Reservations[]
| .Instances[]
| {PublicDnsName, VpcId}

    If this filter is in filter.jq and the sample data from that other answer is in data.json then running

    $ jq -M -f filter.jq data.json

    produces

    {
  "PublicDnsName": "xxxxxxxx",
  "VpcId": "vpc-eb09eb8e"
}

    Once you have objects containing what you want getting the data into another format (e.g. csv) is easy. With this filter

      .Reservations[]
| .Instances[]
| {PublicDnsName, VpcId}
| [.[]]
| @csv

    and the -r option

    $ jq -M -r -f filter.jq data.json

    jq produces

    "xxxxxxxx","vpc-eb09eb8e"

    To add a filtering condition, e.g. VpcId is not null, add a select.

      .Reservations[]
| .Instances[]
| {PublicDnsName, VpcId}
| select(.VpcId != null)
| [.[]]
| @csv
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