No pagination with the AWS CLI

How do you get all the results from an AWS CLI query without pagination?

Published: Thursday, Oct 17, 2024 Last modified: Tuesday, Nov 26, 2024

❯ aws --version
aws-cli/2.17.64 Python/3.12.6 Darwin/23.6.0 source/arm64

Since there is no V2 of https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/v1/userguide/cli-usage-pagination.html … here’s the missing guide and example:

❯ cat engine_types.sh
#!/bin/bash

# Initialize the starting token as empty
next_token=""

# Loop until there's no NextToken
while true; do
    if [ -z "$next_token" ]; then
        # Get the first page of results
        result=$(aws rds describe-db-instances --output json)
    else
        # Get the next page using the starting token
        result=$(aws rds describe-db-instances --starting-token "$next_token" --output json)
    fi

    # Extract the desired fields and print them as CSV
    echo "$result" | jq -r '.DBInstances[] | [.DBInstanceIdentifier, .Engine] | @csv'

    # Get the NextToken from the result
    next_token=$(echo "$result" | jq -r '.NextToken')

    # If there's no NextToken, break the loop
    if [ "$next_token" == "null" ]; then
        break
    fi
done

Note you can’t use --query as that will exclude the NextToken, hence you need to rely on jq to extract the fields you want.