UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm rather new to Unix and I'm trying to write a simple script to search through a dictionary for words based on the letters a user would pass as arguments to the script.
Now I have the searching part done. However, the one thig that still eludes me is that I want to only keep the words that are only 6 characters in length, and separately, 6 characters in length or less.

So far I've been using grep to get the words but it retrieves words of all lengths. How can I do this?

Thanks to all who reply!
Jason

Hi,

I want to search through a file that contains a whole dictionary of words, but I only want to retrieve the words that are 6 letters in length, and secondly, 6 characters in length or less.
How can I do this?

Right now I have this:
grep '^[a-z]' dictionary > results which grabs every word in the dictionary, regardless of length.

Thanks,
Jason

Please review our rules. Cross and duplicate posting is not permitted. I have merged your very similar threads.

Thanks
ZB

cat filename|tr ' \t' '\n\n'|awk 'length($0)<=6'

that's awesome, I'll that. Thanks Abhishek Ghose!!