can pull a lot of data about our deployments and pod.  Most of the time, we humans are the recipients of that information, and obliges by nicely formatting things in pretty tables. kubectl kubectl $ kubectl pods
NAME                        READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
frontend d9f4f776 zp8 / Running s
frontend d9f4f776-flx58 / Running s
frontend d9f4f776-lftdc / Running s
frontend d9f4f776-mrhq6 / Running s get -64 -9f 3 3 0 14 -64 3 3 0 15 -64 3 3 0 15 -64 3 3 0 15 Ah yes, I see the pod is now called "... FIXME ..." In my experience, the very command that I run  needs that auto-generated Pod ID, something like or .  The first couple of times, you'll use the pasteboard – highlight the pod name with your mouse, , and you're off to the races.  By the third, fourth, or fiftieth time, however, you'll be wishing for a better way. next kubectl logs kubectl exec Cmd-C This is UNIX, right?  World-famous for its text processing capabilities?  We got this covered. $ kubectl get pods $ kubectl get pods | awk '{print $1}' $ kubectl get pods | awk | grep -v ^NAME '{print $1}' Well, it work, even if it is a bit awkward, and a lot to type. does has lots of different output formats at its disposal; the default one just happens to be such a good fit for human eyes that we don't always go looking for others.  We can change the output format via the flag.  For example, we can dump all of the pods in JSON format, and then use to parse through it: kubectl -o jq $ kubectl get pods -o json | \
      jq -r frontend 9f4f776 zp8 '.items[0].metadata.name' -64d -9f What happens if we don't have available to us?  This may surprise you, what with this being a blog post about tricks and all, but can do this natively... jq kubectl kubectl It's called JSON Path, and it essentially lets you simple scripts into your call, directly: embed jq kubectl $ kubectl pods -o = frontend-64d9f4f776-9fzp8 get jsonpath '{.items[0].metadata.name}' (Just remember to enclose the variable reference in balanced curly braces.) JSON Path has its fair share of fanciness, including filters.  For example, if you have a pod with lots of constituent containers, you can extract information about a subset like this: $ kubectl get pods -o jsonpath='{ [0] [? ] }'
kv-store
session-cache .items .spec.containers (@. == "redis") image .name Here we're identifying which containers in our pod are running the upstream image.  Neat! redis Also published here .

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