I'm fairly new to shell programming and have run into a line length constraint of grep. I need to run grep on a file to remove certain lines, but grep apparently is limited to lines of 2048 characters or less and most of the lines in the file exceed that limit.

cat ${FULLNAME} | grep -v "${LINE_TO_REMOVE}" > ${DATAFILE}
grep: 0652-226 Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded.

What alternatives are available? the lines that need to be removed are less than 100 characters in length? could I use that fact to remove them? I would still need to check that they match the value of ${LINE_TO_REMOVE}. Also the lines to remove are the last and first lines of the file.

Any suggestions would be welcome! Thanks! -j