textselect is a command-line utility that allows users to interactively select lines from a text file and optionally execute a command with the selected lines. This can be particularly useful for filtering input before processing it with other tools or scripts.
- Interactively select lines from a text file using a curses-based interface.
- Save selected lines to an output file.
- Execute commands with the selected lines as input.
To build textselect from source, you'll need a C compiler and the ncurses library. Clone the repository and run the following commands:
git clone https://github.com/friedelschoen/textselect.git
cd textselect
make
make PREFIX=... installtextselect [-hnv0] [-o output] <input> [command [args...]]-h: Display the help message and exit.-n: Keep empty lines which are not selectable.-o output: Specify an output file to save the selected lines.-v: Invert the selection of lines.-0: Print selected lines delimited by a NUL-character.
UP, LEFT: Move the cursor up.DOWN, RIGHT: Move the cursor down.v: Invert the selection of lines.SPACE: Select or deselect the current line.ENTER, q: Quit the selection interface.
# most simple example, select couple lines from a text-file and print it to the terminal afterwards
textselect input.txt
# select couple lines from a text-file and save it to a text-file
textselect -o output.txt
# select couple lines from a text-file and pass these to `lolcat` for some funny output
textselect input.txt lolcat
# select couple lines from a command and print it to the terminal afterwards (choosing from installed packages in Void Linux)
textselect <(xbps-query -l)
# select couple lines from a command and execute command with lines as arguments (removing unnecessary packages in Void Linux)
textselect <(xbps-query -m) xargs xbps-removeThis project is licensed under the zlib License. See the LICENSE file for details.
Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or submit a pull request on GitHub.