[bsdetector]

> That's not your original request though, to use line-based data.

It wasn't my request and OP (not me) said "line-based data" is best. The comment I replied to said "Newline-delimited JSON ... a line-based format".

If the only objection you have is "but that's line-based!" then you're in a completely different conversation.

> if anything, json output | jq is more the unix way than piping everything through shell vars.

The unix way is line-based. The comment I replied to is talking about line-based output. Line-based output is the only structure for data universal to unix cmdline tools - even tab/space isn't universal; sending structured non-line-delimited data to a program to unpack it is the least unix-like way to do it.

Also there's no pipe in the shell-variable output scheme I described, whereas "json | jq" is a shell pipeline.