Export environment variables to JSON in Bash

Question

The environment variables can be printed by using export or printenv in bash, but how can we convert the output into JSON format and then store them in a variable.

Answer 1

JQ does that for you and populates an internal variable called ENV with the result, which can be exported to a shell variable like so:

var=$(jq -n '$ENV')

To remove junk variables like _, SHLVL, etc. from the list you can use the del function.

var=$(jq -n '$ENV | del(._, .SHLVL)')