5

I need a grep command that finds all lines that only contain words with lengths greater than 10.

this is the grep I wrote to find words bigger than 10 characters.

grep -E '(\w{11,})' input

How would I manipulate this command to include every word on the line?

Improve this question
2
  • 1
    Dear Mike, please consider accepting the answer which solved your question by clicking ✔sign next to the answer. thank you Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 6:29
  • yes mike, please :) The answer is a good one even after 5 years @αғsнιη (though mike is last seen 4 years ago :( ) Commented Mar 8, 2022 at 15:34

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
9

Your condition might be more easily expressed in the contrapositive: instead of including lines where all words have length > 10, exclude those lines which have a word with length <= 10. Since grep supports both negation and word-matching, this could be written as, say:

grep -vwE '\w{1,10}'
  • -v negates the match
  • -w means that the regex should match a whole word

As Sundeep noted, we should use {1,10} to avoid matching the empty string (and thus every line).

Improve this answer
1
  • 1
    use {1,10} ... see the output for echo 'fooo bar ;' | grep -vwE '\w{,2}' and echo 'fooo bar ;' | grep -vwE '\w{1,2}' Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 5:46

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.