Exclude files that have very long lines of text from grep output

grep

I often run grep commands to find things in my code, but the problem with web projects is that there will often be compressed JavaScript and CSS files which create one huge line of text, so that if a match is found, the whole terminal window is filled for more then a 1000 lines, making it extremely impractical to find what I'm looking for.

So is there a way to avoid files that have say single lines of text over 200 characters?

Best Answer

With GNU grep and xargs:

grep -rLZE '.{200}' . | xargs -r0 grep pattern

Alternatively, you could cut the output of grep:

grep -r pattern . | cut -c1-"$COLUMNS"

or tell your terminal not to wrap text if it supports it:

tput rmam
grep -r pattern .

or use less -S

grep -r pattern . | less -S

Related Solutions

Shell – How to find text in files and only keep the respective matching lines using the terminal on OS X

grep would only find lines matching a pattern in a file, it wouldn't change the file. You could use sed to find the pattern and make changes to the file:

sed '/\B\/foobar\b/!d' filename

would display lines matching /foobar in the file. In order to save changes to the file in-place, use the -i option.

sed -i '/\B\/foobar\b/!d' filename

You could use it with find too:

find . -type f -exec sed -i'' '/\B\/foobar\b/!d' {} \;

Grep doesn’t work with both -v and -A/B

If you can use sed instead of grep, it provides a nice solution:

sed -e '/This error/,+3d' myfile

This removes the line containing the string This error and the following three lines, but outputs everything else. This sed command requires GNU sed (the +3 address is an extension).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shell – How to find text in files and only keep the respective matching lines using the terminal on OS X

Grep doesn’t work with both -v and -A/B

Related Question