Add JSON objects to array using jq

Question

My goal is to output a JSON object using jq on the output of a find command in bash. It could either be a one-line command or a bash script.

I have this command which creates JSON objects from each line of output:

find ~/ -maxdepth 1 -name "D*" | \
while read line; \
do jq -n \
--arg name "$(basename "$line")" \
--arg path "$line" \
'{name: $name, path: $path}'; \
done

The output looks like this:

{
  "name": "Desktop",
  "path": "/Users/username/Desktop"
}
{
  "name": "Documents",
  "path": "/Users/username/Documents"
}
{
  "name": "Downloads",
  "path": "/Users/username/Downloads"
}

But I need these objects to be in an array, and I need the array to be the value of a a parent object's single key called items, like so:

{"items": [
    {
      "name": "Desktop",
      "path": "/Users/username/Desktop"
    },
    {
      "name": "Documents",
      "path": "/Users/username/Documents"
    },
    {
      "name": "Downloads",
      "path": "/Users/username/Downloads"
    }
  ]
}

I tried adding the square brackets to the jq output string for each line ('[{name: $name, path: $path}]';) and that adds the brackets but not the commas between the array elements.

I found possible solutions here but I could not figure out how to use them while looping through each line.

Solution

This trick with the jq 1.5 inputs streaming filter seems to do it

... | jq -n '.items |= [inputs]'

Ex.

$ find ~/ -maxdepth 1 -name "D*" | 
    while read line; do 
      jq -n --arg name "$(basename "$line")" --arg path "$line" '{name: $name, path: $path}'
    done | jq -n '.items |= [inputs]'
{
  "items": [
    {
      "name": "Downloads",
      "path": "/home/steeldriver/Downloads"
    },
    {
      "name": "Desktop",
      "path": "/home/steeldriver/Desktop"
    },
    {
      "name": "Documents",
      "path": "/home/steeldriver/Documents"
    }
  ]
}

Comments

[Employee]

Thank you, this works. Also, when seeing your example output I realized that I'd made a mistake in the example output that I included... it showed an invalid list of arrays for the value of the items field. I corrected the question just now. Your example produces a single array of objects, which is what I needed.