One way to print out the number of characters in each line of a file:
awk '{print length, $0}'
One way to find the longest line is awk '{print length, $0}'|sort -nr|head -1. For example, to find the line with the maximum length in the file abcd.txt, (and how long that line is) you could run:
cat abcd.txt|awk '{print length, $0}'|sort -nr|head -1
If you just want to know what the largest length is, you can remove the , $0 like so:
cat abcd.txt|awk '{print length}'|sort -nr|head -1
Thanks
I found this tip helpful.
You could also use wc -L
You could also use wc -L
you can't allways use wc -L
see $subject,
depending on the 'wc' you have you can or can't use the -L option
the awk method is preferable though as it also actually prints the line you're searching for.
a colleage of mine wrote a little scrit which actually finds the longest line, notice I had to use nawk
on a solaris box instead of the plain awk as it handles longer lines better :)
#!/bin/ksh
nawk 'BEGIN {longest=0} {
if ( length($0) > longest)
{
longest=length($0)
ll=$0
}}
END { print ll }' <$1
Great tip
Found this page on a google search and it was exactly what I was looking for. Thanks! I need to learn to use awk better.
Useless use of `cat' here.
Useless use of `cat' here. :-)
That is, it is preferrable to do:
awk '{print length, $0}' abcd.txt |sort -nr|head -1
Otherwise, wonderful.