Output UNIX environment as JSON

Question

I'd like a unix one-liner that will output the current execution environment as a JSON structure like: { "env-var" : "env-value", ... etc ... }

This kinda works:

(echo "{"; printenv | sed 's/\"/\\\"/g' | sed -n 's|\(.*\)=\(.*\)|"\1"="\2"|p' | grep -v '^$' | paste -s -d"," -; echo "}")

but has some extra lines and I think won't work if the environment values or variables have '=' or newlines in them.

Would prefer pure bash/sh, but compact python / perl / ruby / etc one-liners would also be appreciated.

Answer 1

Using jq 1.5 (e.g. jq 1.5rc2 -- see http://stedolan.github.io/jq):

$ jq -n env

Answer 2

This works for me:

python -c 'import json, os;print(json.dumps(dict(os.environ)))'

It's pretty simple; the main complication is that os.environ is a dict-like object, but it is not actually a dict, so you have to convert it to a dict before you feed it to the json serializer.

Adding parentheses around the print statement lets it work in both Python 2 and 3, so it should work for the forseeable future on most *nix systems (especially since Python comes by default on any major distro).