grep to find files that contain a string greater than x characters long?

I consider myself a regex noob, but I created a bunch of files with variable length strings in them and I think I got what you wanted, try this:

user@host$ grep -e '[^\ ]\{7,\}' *

---

For those who don't quite understand this:

-e makes grep search using a regex. [^\ ] means to match a single character except space. \{7,\} means to match a string of 7 or more characters. If you were to put another number afther , it would be strings between 7 and x characters.