[SOLVED] Discard short lines?

danielbmartin · 04-24-2010, 11:54 AM

Hello.

I have a file containing one word per line.
I want to discard all lines containing words shorter than five characters.

Have:
Once
upon
a
midnight
dreary
while
I
pondered
weak
and
weary

Want:
midnight
dreary
while
pondered
weary

Is there a Linux command which will do this?
I seek a basic command, not awk, not Perl, because I haven't learned those things yet.

Daniel B. Martin

amani · 04-24-2010, 12:14 PM

use regular expressions and any editing tool... what else?

pixellany · 04-24-2010, 12:22 PM

See my post in your other recent thread.....

Code:

egrep ".{5}.*" filename

Do you understand how this works? If not, go here: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Regular.html

H_TeXMeX_H · 04-24-2010, 12:23 PM

Code:

bash-3.1$ grep ..... test.txt
midnight
dreary
while
pondered
weary

I know I probably shouldn't have posted it, but it's so simple.

grail · 04-24-2010, 11:10 PM

Knowing how you are not ready for awk and such, here is asimple bash alternative:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

while read line
do
	[[ ${#line} -ge 5 ]] && echo $line
done <infile

danielbmartin · 04-25-2010, 09:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pixellany

See my post in your other recent thread.....

Code:

egrep ".{5}.*" filename

Do you understand how this works? If not, go here: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Regular.html

Thanks for a perfect answer.
I'll mark this one as solved.

Daniel B. Martin