Tips on Adding JSON Output to Your CLI App (via) Kelly Brazil - also the author of jc, the neat CLI tool that converts the output of common Unix utilities such as dig into JSON - provides some useful do's and don'ts for adding JSON output as an option to a command-line tool.
Kelly recommends defaulting to arrays of flat objects - or newline-delimited objects - and suggests including an "unbuffer" option for streaming tools that discourages the OS from buffering output that is being sent through a pipe.
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