How to delete all lines which contain a word with TextWrangler?

Question

I have a giant file with thousands of lines, I want to delete only the lines which have the word "Foo" in them.

How would I go about doing this? I'm on a Mac, so I could use some command line utility, but I'd prefer to use TextWrangler.

Answer 1

Most graphical programmer's editors do not allow you to delete lines like this, but only change their contents. This can be done by replacing ^.*Foo.*$ with nothing.

If you're willing to look towards an external tool then this can be done by filtering through sed "/Foo/d".

Answer 2

Use a regular expression to find the lines, then replace them with an empty string.

Here's a page that explains how to construct the regular expression:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/completelines.html

To do this in TextWrangler:

1. Choose Find from the Search menu.
2. Check the Grep checkbox.
3. Enter the regular expression in the Find: text box.
4. Select Next.

Answer 3

If you search-and-replace ^.*Foo.*\r with nothing (with "Use Grep" enabled), it'll completely get rid of lines with "Foo" in them, not just blank them out. The only limit is that it won't work on the last line in the file. (Replacing \r.*Foo.*$ with nothing would work on the last line, but not the first.)

Answer 4

A quick command line for this is:

grep -v myword myfile > newfile