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sbuck
Asked: 2010-01-31 15:07:56 +0800 CST

grep to find files that contain a string greater than x characters long?

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Is it possible to locate files in a directory that have strings (with no spaces) longer than x length?

linux grep regular-expressions

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I consider myself a regex noob, but I created a bunch of files with variable length strings in them and I think I got what you wanted, try this:

    user@host$ grep -e '[^\ ]\{7,\}' *

    For those who don't quite understand this:

    -e makes grep search using a regex. [^\ ] means to match a single character except space. \{7,\} means to match a string of 7 or more characters. If you were to put another number afther , it would be strings between 7 and x characters.

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  2. I couldn't get the example above to work. I was searching for lines in a CSV file longer than 10000 characters. I messed around quite a bit and got this... Find lines longer than 9999 characters...

    grep -a -e '[^\ ]\{9999,\}' *.csv >../my-file.csv

    And this is what I really needed. Lines in CSV file less than 10000 characters. find lines less than 9999 characters

    grep -a -v -e '[^\ ]\{9999,\}' *.csv >../my-file.csv
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