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How do I exclude very long lines from grep results?

I often grep through lots of .js files (-r) and some of them are compiled, so they consist of a single line usually a couple thousand characters long. From all that clutter I find it hard to see the results from the rest of the files.

What should I pass to grep to exclude lines that are, say, more than 1000 character long?

I'd prefer not having to pipe the result through another grep, as that would make me lose colours from the output, or having to add the first grep at the end of the pipe again to get back the colours.

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You could pipe it into cut but then you'd still lose the colors: grep -r "foo"|cut -c 1000. –  Andrew Lambert Feb 4 '12 at 6:27
You could switch to a better tool :-) ack - grep on steroids and then use this answer stackoverflow.com/a/2034806/17413 –  Nifle Feb 4 '12 at 8:42
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up vote 2 down vote accepted

Piping the grep to something won't necessarily get rid of the colors. That behavior results from --color=auto (which if you check alias grep is probably what you're using). You can override it and pass --color=always and grep will preserve the colors even through a pipe.

As far as excluding the lines, you could pipe to whatever tool you like (e.g. cut as Amazed mentioned). Keep in mind, that the colors from grep will insert extra bytes into the matched lines, if that matters to you. There's no obvious way to (to me anyway) do it in the same grep invocation.

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Yes, I have set --color=auto in my .bashrc. Using --color=always with cut did the trick. –  Attila O. Feb 7 '12 at 2:49
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