Question: Get the selected line **number**?

[infokiller]

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Hey, is there an option in fzf for outputting the line number that I'm missing?

If not, what's the best way to get the selected line number, as opposed to the actual line content?
Right now I have a script which does this in an hacky way by grepping for the selected line, but this won't always work (for example, if there are duplicate lines in the stream).

Thanks!

[junegunn]

Have you looked at #1014?

[infokiller]

Thanks a lot @junegunn that looks perfect!
Didn't know about the --with-nth option which is what I needed to implement this.

[ElectricRCAircraftGuy]

fzf show line numbers

To have fzf show the matching line number of a text file you are searching in, then do this:

grep -n '' "path/to/file.txt" | fzf

(this won't show line numbers)

cat "path/to/file.txt" | fzf

I like to also add -m --reverse to fzf:

grep -n '' "path/to/file.txt" | fzf -m --reverse

[infokiller]

@ElectricRCAircraftGuy I'm not sure what comment are you replying to, since no one mentioned using cat for this in this issue. Anyway, the solution posted here seems better: it can hide line numbers and it's also faster than grep -n.

[ElectricRCAircraftGuy]

@infokiller , oh, sorry, I'm just documenting a generic answer to the title of the question: "Get the selected line number?", which I am demonstrating how to do when passing regular text files to fzf to fuzzy search within the file, which is something I previously did with cat. I wasn't able to find that anywhere, but google searches led me here so I just jotted it down for future readers who stumble here looking for what I was looking for. find doesn't meet my need as it finds file paths, but I want to fuzzy search file content.

Anyway, what I've got above does just that for anyone else who is looking for it.

[Agent-E11]

@ElectricRCAircraftGuy It looks like you can alter the the answer infokiller linked to to get what you want:

nl -ba file.txt | fzf | awk '{ print $1 }'

This will add line numbers to the contents of file.txt (-ba means to also include empty lines), and pipe that to fzf to search through. Then print out the line number of the selected line using awk.

Personally, I think this looks cleaner than the grep -n answer