short – command line tool to truncate lines to fit in the terminal

Sometimes I run grep commands that search files with hugely-long lines. If those lines match, they are printed out and spam my terminal with huge amounts of information, that I probably don’t need.

I couldn’t find a tool that limits the line-length of its output, so I wrote a tiny one.

It’s called short.

You use it like this (my typical usage):

grep foo myfile.txt | short

Or specify the column width like this:

short -w 5 myfile.txt

It’s written in Rust. Feel free to add features, fix bugs and package it for your operating system/distribution at gitlab.com/andybalaam/short.

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