Print only structured response at goose run --recipe

[flat35hd99]

Please explain the motivation behind the feature request.
Does this feature solve a particular problem you have been experiencing? What opportunities or use cases would be unlocked with this feature?

I often embed goose as a tool in my shell scripts like:

NO_COLOR=1 goose run --recipe find_all_tasks | tail -n1 | jq '.tasks[]' | ...

The problems are

• You must set NO_COLOR env otherwise the output contains color control chars.
• To retrieve JSON and pipe to jq, you must do tail -n1
  • I believed --quiet is the solution, but it is not. feat(cli): Add --quiet /-q flag to goose run #2939

Describe the solution you'd like
A clear and concise description of what you want to happen.

One of:

• Add a option --output-format=json
• Add a option --machine-readable
• Introduce breaking change into --quite option as I thought.

Describe alternatives you've considered
A clear and concise description of any alternative solutions or features you've considered.

Additional context
Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

• I have verified this does not duplicate an existing feature request

[DOsinga]

can you not use the recent feature of the output format for a recipe? this should make goose print only (I think) the structured output as the last line of the output as a json document.

/cc @jsibbison-square

[flat35hd99]

@DOsinga Thank you for your response.

I often use the structured output of recipe. You mean that the feature is not recommended for me?

Let me describe the issue more.

My goal

Pass the final output of recipe below to jq.

version: "1.0.0"
title: "xxx"
description: "yyy"
extensions:
  - type: builtin
    name: developer
    timeout: 300
    bundled: true

prompt: |
  Get files of current directory using `ls`
response:
  json_schema:
    type: object
    properties:
      files:
        type: array
        items:
          type: string

It does not work.

$ goose run --quiet --recipe ../output.yaml | jq
parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 1, column 8

thread 'main' panicked at library/std/src/io/stdio.rs:1165:9:
failed printing to stdout: Broken pipe (os error 32)
note: run with `RUST_BACKTRACE=1` environment variable to display a backtrace

How to fix this problem

There are two problems:

• The last line has ANSI escape code
• There are lots of unnecessary string

Let's check the output using goose run --quiet --recipe ../output.yaml > output.txt

The output.txt is below. You can see that the last line has ANSI escape code.

Loading recipe: xxx
Description: yyy


─── shell | developer ──────────────────────────
command: ls

─── final_output | recipe ──────────────────────────
files:
    -
        bar
    -
        foo
    -
        foobar
    -
        output.txt

^[[38;2;222;222;222m{"files":["bar","foo","foobar","output.txt"]}^[[0m

So, we should set NO_COLOR environment variable.

$ NO_COLOR=1 goose run --quiet --recipe ../output.yaml > output.txt

The final output does not have ANSI escape code but the progress remains.

Loading recipe: xxx
Description: yyy


─── shell | developer ──────────────────────────
command: ls
I found the following files in the current directory: `bar`, `foo`, `foobar`, and `output.txt`.

Is there anything else I can help you with?
  ^[[2m2025-07-31T14:20:34.759172Z^[[0m ^[[33m WARN^[[0m ^[[1;33mgoose::agents::agent^[[0m^[[33m: ^[[33mFinal output tool has not been called yet. Continuing agent loop.^[[0m    ^[[2;3mat^[[0m crates/goose/src/agents/agent.rs:1023

You MUST call the `final_output` tool NOW with the final output for the user.
─── final_output | recipe ──────────────────────────
files:
    -
        bar
    -
        foo
    -
        foobar
    -
        output.txt

{"files":["bar","foo","foobar","output.txt"]}

Finally, you can obtain the last line using tail -n1

NO_COLOR=1 goose run --quiet --recipe ../output.yaml | tail -n1 > output.txt

{"files":["bar","foo","foobar","output.txt"]}

Solutions I wish

// The option name is just example.
goose run --only-final-output --recipe ../output.yaml | jq
{"files":["bar","foo","foobar","output.txt"]}

[DOsinga]

ah, thanks. I think the solution is then that goose should detect that it is piping its output and not printing to the terminal and in that case suppress all ansi nonsense. does that sound right?

[DOsinga]

I kinda imagined that the tail -n1 wouldn't be a big deal - you might have to live with that a bit longer

[DOsinga]

Put up a PR to fix this partly

[flat35hd99]

Wow!! Thank you so much!! It really helpful for me 👍