Breaking changes

• Switched to treating blank responses (empty or whitespace-only) like other errors. They no longer update stored data. However, they now produce a distint "blank response" error with --verbose. There doesn't seem to be a practical benefit to distinguishing between these and other invalid responses (beyond a special error), and a blank document isn't valid JSON according to RFC 8259. (JSON-text = ws value ws; value is mandatory.)

Features

• Added a new subcommand, init. The subcommand outputs shell completions for Bash, fish, Elvish, PowerShell, and Zsh.

This release features a number of breaking changes. Typical usage remains the same except for the default polling interval. The interval has been increased to 2 seconds to match similar software.

Breaking changes

• Started to distinguish between an error when fetching or parsing data and an empty response. For example, a JSON HTTP endpoint returning error 500 and then recovering with the same data as before the error will be treated as zero changes. It was treated as two. The same now applies to a JSON endpoint or command suddenly returning !@#$%. An empty response consisting of nothing or only whitespace is still treated as empty JSON, i.e., that all data has been removed.
• Removed the short aliases c for cmd and u for url. They look too much like short options.
• Replaced -d/--debug with -v/--verbose that has two levels. Level one only prints errors; level two also prints input data. We no longer print input data as is; control characters are escaped for security reasons. A priority goal is to prevent ANSI injection attacks. A separate "End of multiline input data" debug message is printed after multiline input data.
• Changed the default polling interval from 1 second to 2 seconds like watch and Viddy.
• Limited the url response size to 128 MiB.

Features

• Added the option-c/--changes that makes jsonwatch exit after a given number of changes.

Build

• Started generating signed checksums of the release binaries. Go to dbohdan.com/pubkeys to verify the checksum.

• Added a new option for the url subcommand: -H/--header.

• Switched to a CLI with subcommands.
• The command argument is no longer passed to a shell.
• Added the option -d/--debug.
• Added a short version-D for --no-data and -I for --no-initial-values.

• Make HTTP requests with the cURL User-Agent header.

Changes

• Compare arrays using a diff-like algorithm. Detect element insertions and deletions to show a more informative, easier to read list of changes.
• Smaller binaries.

This release fixes the handling of UTF-8 JSON output from processes. On Windows you may need to execute the command chcp 65001 before running jsonwatch to see non-ASCII output correctly.

This release makes usability improvements. Jsonwatch now

• Reformats the initial values to be human-readable (i.e., prettifies JSON);
• Sorts the changed, removed, and added values in the output by their key;
• Prints integers without the useless ".0" at the end.