Longest line in a file

Question

I\'m looking for a simple way to find the length of the longest line in a file. Ideally, it would be a simple bash shell command instead of a script.

Answer 1

Just for fun and educational purpose, the pure POSIX shell solution, without useless use of cat and no forking to external commands. Takes filename as first argument:

#!/bin/sh

MAX=0 IFS=
while read -r line; do
  if [ ${#line} -gt $MAX ]; then MAX=${#line}; fi
done < "$1"
printf "$MAX\n"