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

perl -ne 'print length()."  line $.  $_"' myfile | sort -nr | head -n 1

Prints the length, line number, and contents of the longest line

perl -ne 'print length()."  line $.  $_"' myfile | sort -n

Prints a sorted list of all lines, with line numbers and lengths

. is the concatenation operator - it is used here after length()
$. is the current line number
$_ is the current line