jo

jo is a lightweight command-line utility authored by Jan-Piet Mens that converts shell data into properly formatted JSON output, making it a practical tool for system administrators, DevOps engineers, and developers who need to generate JSON documents directly from shell scripts or interactive terminals. Released in a single stable version 1.9, jo accepts simple key–value pairs, arrays, and nested structures supplied as arguments or standard input, then emits syntactically correct JSON without requiring complex quoting or escape sequences. Typical use cases include building configuration payloads for REST APIs, preparing data for log aggregation services, feeding JSON to monitoring agents, and producing test fixtures during continuous-integration pipelines; it is equally useful for ad-hoc one-liners in Bash, Zsh, or PowerShell sessions where quick JSON serialization is required. Because jo is implemented as a compact native binary, it starts instantly, imposes negligible memory overhead, and can be chained with standard Unix utilities such as curl, jq, or ssh to automate cloud provisioning tasks, Kubernetes interactions, and remote server management scripts. The utility is distributed under an open-source license and is often packaged by major Linux distributions, yet Windows users can obtain ready-to-run builds that integrate seamlessly with PowerShell, CMD, or Windows Terminal, placing it in the System Shell Tools category of the catalog. jo is available for free on get.nero.com, with downloads provided via trusted Windows package sources (e.g. winget), always delivering the latest version, and supporting batch installation of multiple applications.

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