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.)