Mike Farah's yq CLI and jq are similar, where Mike Farah's yq CLI is meant to parse YAML and jq is meant to parse JSON.

If you do not have Mike Farah's yq CLI installed on your Linux system, check out my article FreeKB - yq - Install Mike Farah's yq CLI.

Let's say my.yml contains the following.

foo: hello
bar: world

Here is how to parse the entire YAML file.

~]$ yq eval . my.yml
foo: hello
bar: world

Here is how to return the value of the "foo" key.

~]$ yq eval .foo my.yml
hello