Super User is a question and answer site for computer enthusiasts and power users. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The use case is that I am searching for a particular CSS attribute in a directory of HTML/CSS/JS files (including sub-directories). Some one-liner JS libraries also have the CSS attribute that I'm searching for.
So is there a way to tell grep that it should not give result on a line which is longer than my defined $max_line_length ?
Thank you!
First approach, try to exclude the one-liner JS files from being grepped in the first place. Often these will have a name like some-library.min.js, so you could do something like:
$ grep --exclude '*.min.js' ...
Another approach is that if you know that it's going to be in a CSS file, you can use ack to restrict your search to CSS files (and ignore various VCS cruft):
$ ack --type=css ...
However, to answer your question, you can write a regular expression to match on line length. The following will match any line with 100 or fewer characters.
$ grep -E '^.{,100}$'
