How to remove lines shorter than XY

sedtext processing

I found a question about, how to remove lines longer then 2048 chars:

How to delete line if longer than XY?

Q: But how can I remove lines shorter then 4 chars? So remove lines that has 1 or 2 or 3 length in a file.

UPDATE: Thanks for the many GOOD answers, but I can only mark one as OK

Best Answer

You could use sed. The following would remove lines that are 3 characters long or smaller:

sed -r '/^.{,3}$/d' filename

In order to save the changes to the file in-place, supply the -i option.

If your version of sed doesn't support extended RE syntax, then you could write the same in BRE:

sed '/^.\{,3\}$/d' filename

which would work with all sed variants.

You could also use awk:

awk 'length($0)>3' filename

Using perl:

perl -lne 'length()>3 && print' filename
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