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reddit

Quick start

From an empty terminal to a real listing, a real comment tree, and a real profile, in a handful of commands.

This walks the core loop: list a subreddit, read a post's comment tree, look up a user and a community, and search. Every command here reads the public .json view, so none of it needs an API key or an account.

1. List a subreddit

reddit posts golang

Each row is a post from r/golang's hot listing. Sort and window it like the site does:

reddit posts golang --sort top --time week -n 25

--sort takes hot, new, top, rising, or controversial; --time applies to top and controversial.

2. Read a comment tree

reddit comments 1abc23

That flattens the discussion under post 1abc23 into one record per comment, each carrying its depth and parent so the tree shape survives. Sort and cap it:

reddit comments 1abc23 --sort top -n 200

Deep threads hide their tail behind "load more" stubs. Follow them with --expand:

reddit comments 1abc23 --expand

3. Look up a user and a subreddit

reddit user spez
reddit subreddit golang

Both take a bare name, a u/ or r/ prefix, or a full URL, and return a structured record. The same as JSON:

reddit subreddit golang -o json

reddit search "context deadline" --in golang -n 25

Drop --in to search site-wide. Discover communities and users by name:

reddit subreddits programming -n 20
reddit users gallowboob -n 20

5. Classify without fetching

id turns a URL or id into a (kind, id) pair without touching the network, which is handy in scripts:

reddit id https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1abc23/title/

INPUT                                                   KIND  ID
https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/1abc23/title/  post  1abc23

6. Compose

Output that pipes is the point. Pull the URLs off a listing:

reddit posts golang --sort top -o jsonl | jq -r .url

Get one author's posts, keeping two fields:

reddit user-posts spez --fields title,score

Where to next

You have the core loop. From here:

2 min read