Over the last year I’ve run into some pretty massive JSON files. One recent examples is from AWS, which publishes a 120mb file containing a list of their available services that they have yet to provide documentation for. Attempting to open that in a standard editor is not going to be pleasant, and while tearing it apart with something like jq is certainly an option it doesn’t feel like the best approach.

That’s why I’ve build jsonsmash, an emulated shell that lets users browse through their massive json files as if they were actually filesystems. It uses shell commands any linux user would already be familiar with to make it very straightforward to figure out the schema of a json object (even if it is a few hundred megabytes) and pull out specific data.

Development is on github and the package is published on npmjs.