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I have a text file with about 8 million rows in it. I need to remove all the rows with a single character in them. For example

This is 
the 
text file 
I 
wrote

I want to remove the entire line that has the pronoun "I" on it. Bonus points to the one who can do this on the linux command line.

over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo

sed can do that as well:

sed '/^.$/d' inputFile

To store the output in a new file:

sed '/^.$/d' inputFile > outputFile

or for in-file editing:

sed -i '/^.$/d' inputFile

over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report

All you need is:

grep '..' file

unless you want to keep empty lines as well in which case it'd be:

grep -v '^.$' file

over 4 years ago · Santiago Trujillo Report

Answer question

Accepted Answer · 2022-04-21T17:56:41.555Z

Here is a try:

awk 'length>1' file

and if you do not want to delete blank lines (with zero characters)

awk 'length!=1' file

And if you have spaces on the lines (that you do not want to count as characters):

awk '{gsub(/[[:space:]]/,"")}length!=1' file