jq: error: syntax error, Unexpected $end (Unix shell quoting issues?) at <builtin>, line 29: )

Question

Started seeing this issue with jq suddenly out of the blue for my system where its failing for simplest of use-cases:

$ echo '{"foo": 0}' | jq .
jq: error: syntax error, unexpected $end (Unix shell quoting issues?) at <builtin>, line 29:
  )
jq: 1 compile error

Here's a description of my environment:

OS and Version: MacOS Catalina 10.15.7, 64-bit jq versions: 1.6, 1.5, 1.4

I tried installing jq with brew (brew install jq) as well as using binaries directly provided here for OSX 64-bit and getting same error. It works strangely however with jq-1.3 but thats a pretty old version missing some important filters like gsub.

Answer 1

Posted this issue in jq github repo and got prompted for issue with ~/.jq file. Indeed my ~/.jq file had the said syntax error. Fixing my ~/.jq file fixed the issue.