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

[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.