Command Tooling

The Zed system is managed and queried with the zed command, which is organized into numerous subcommands like the familiar command patterns of docker or kubectrl. Built-in help for the zed command and all of its subcommands is always accessible with the -h flag.

The zq command offers a convenient slice of zed for running stand-alone, command-line queries on inputs from files, HTTP URLs, or S3. zq is like jq but is easier and faster, utilizes the richer Zed data model, and interoperates with a number of other formats beyond JSON. If you don't need a Zed lake, you can install just the slimmer zq command which omits lake support and dev tools.

zq is always installed alongside zed. You might find yourself mixing and matching zed lake queries with zq local queries and stitching them all together with Unix pipelines.