Generating a comma-separated list from grep

[sophie]

Sometimes you want to paste the output of a grep command into IRC or IM, and don't want each match on a separate line. Fortunately, it's easy to convert it to a comma-separated list instead - simply pipe the output through xargs echo | sed 's/ /, /g'. So, for example, instead of:

Sophie@Sophie-Laptop:~/primtionary$ grep cuddle american-english-insane
cuddle
cuddleable
cuddled
cuddler
cuddlers
cuddles
cuddlesome
scuddle
scuddled
scuddles
upscuddle

...you get:

Sophie@Sophie-Laptop:~/primtionary$ grep cuddle american-english-insane | xargs echo | sed 's/ /, /g'
cuddle, cuddleable, cuddled, cuddler, cuddlers, cuddles, cuddlesome, scuddle, scuddled, scuddles, upscuddle

Very useful sometimes :D

Comments

[doldonius]

You could also make it right in the shell.

function tocsl()
{
export comma='';
while read word; do echo -n "$comma$word"; comma=', '; done;
echo;
}

(This doesn't really have to be a function, of course. A simple { list; } would do just as well.)

cat, grep, sed and awk

[babysprite]

cat, grep, sed and awk are three of the most powerful utilities in the *NIX toolbox.

... wishing you a safe and happy Hogamany and New Year,

Robert

/\__/\
(='.'=)
(")_(")

Kitty wishes you a safe and happy one, too. Too many pints for me, so I'd better be making my way back home.

[afuna]

Neat, thanks!

[jld]

That xargs makes me twitchy...

grep '^it.' /usr/share/dict/words | xargs echo


Or, for more fun, on a GNU system:

xargs echo << EOT
-e
\\\\e[40;33;1m
BEES
BEES
BEES
EOT

[karmag]

I don't know whether it's something BSD-specific or not, but rs can do this pretty elegantly too.

$ whatis rs
rs (1) - reshape a data array

Invoked as "rs -C, 1" it will convert an input separated by newlines to a comma separated output:

$ grep '^oxym' /usr/share/dict/words | rs -C, 1
oxymandelic,oxymel,oxymethylene,oxymoron,oxymuriate,oxymuriatic,

Plus you can undo the transformation too, if you pipe the comma separated input through "rs -c, 0 1" (lower case c).

The downside is that rs will leave you with a trailing comma, but as long as that's not an issue it's a pretty neat trick.

[doldonius]

I don't know whether it's something BSD-specific or not

I'm afraid it is. Even Debian lacks it.