Solution 1:

Consider also passing in the shell variable (EMAILID) as a jq variable (here also EMAILID, for the sake of illustration):

   projectID=$(jq -r --arg EMAILID "$EMAILID" '
        .resource[]
        | select(.username==$EMAILID) 
        | .id' file.json)

Postscript

For the record, another possibility would be to use jq's env function for accessing environment variables. For example, consider this sequence of bash commands:

[email protected]  # not exported
EMAILID="$EMAILID" jq -n 'env.EMAILID'

The output is a JSON string:

"[email protected]"

Solution 2:

I resolved this issue by escaping the inner double quotes

projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r ".resource[] | select(.username==\"$EMAILID\") | .id")

Solution 3:

Posting it here as it might help others. In string it might be necessary to pass the quotes to jq. To do the following with jq:

.items[] | select(.name=="string")

in bash you could do

EMAILID=$1
projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r '.resource[] | select(.username=='\"$EMAILID\"') | .id')

essentially escaping the quotes and passing it on to jq