Output JSON from Bash script

If you only need to output a small JSON, use printf:

printf '{"hostname":"%s","distro":"%s","uptime":"%s"}\n' "$hostname" "$distro" "$uptime"

Or if you need to produce a larger JSON, use a heredoc as explained by leandro-mora. If you use the here-doc solution, please be sure to upvote his answer:

cat <<EOF > /your/path/myjson.json{"id" : "$my_id"}EOF

Some of the more recent distros, have a file called: /etc/lsb-release or similar name (cat /etc/*release). Therefore, you could possibly do away with dependency your on Python:

distro=$(awk -F= 'END { print $2 }' /etc/lsb-release)

An aside, you should probably do away with using backticks. They're a bit old fashioned.

I find it much more easy to create the json using cat:

cat <<EOF > /your/path/myjson.json{"id" : "$my_id"}EOF

I'm not a bash-ninja at all, but I wrote a solution, that works perfectly for me. So, I decided to share it with community.

First of all, I created a bash script called json.sh

arr=();while read x y; do     arr=("${arr[@]}" $x $y)donevars=(${arr[@]})len=${#arr[@]}printf "{"for (( i=0; i<len; i+=2 ))do    printf "\"${vars[i]}\": ${vars[i+1]}"    if [ $i -lt $((len-2)) ] ; then        printf ", "    fidoneprintf "}"echo

And now I can easily execute it:

$ echo key1 1 key2 2 key3 3 | ./json.sh{"key1":1, "key2":2, "key3":3}