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Is it possible to find any lines in a file that exceed 79 characters?

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In order of decreasing speed according to my tests:

grep '.\{80\}' file

perl -nle 'print if length$_>79' file

awk 'length($0)>79' file

sed -n '/.\{80\}/p' file
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What do you mean by "efficient"? – bladezzz Jul 12 '12 at 18:30
I think manatwork means typing efficiency. awk can come closer if you drop ($0), which is implicit anyway ;). – Thor Jul 12 '12 at 18:36
Oh, thanks for the clarification. I don't particularly care about speed though. – bladezzz Jul 12 '12 at 18:37
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BTW, if you anchor the regexp to the beginning of the line with ^, it's slightly faster: e.g. grep '^.\{80\}' file. – Craig Sanders Jul 29 '12 at 9:32
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The perl solution does not account for variable size encoding such as UTF-8, unlike all the other solutions. – BatchyX Jan 30 at 16:19
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