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

Question

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

Answer 1

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,\}' *

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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.

Answer 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 >../keslerun.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 >../keslerrun.csv