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

I'm in a Unix environment, and work with gzipped files that are a few GBs in size. I tested the following commands using a 2 GB gzipped file with record length of 2052.

1. zcat | wc -L

and

2. zcat | awk '{print length}' | sort -u

The times were on avarage

1. 117 seconds

2. 109 seconds

Here is my script after about 10 runs.

START=$(date +%s) ## time of start

zcat $1 |  wc -L

END=$(date +%s) ## time of end
DIFF=$(( $END - $START ))
echo "It took $DIFF seconds"

START=$(date +%s) ## time of start

zcat $1 |  awk '{print length}' | sort -u

END=$(date +%s) ## time of end
DIFF=$(( $END - $START ))
echo "It took $DIFF seconds"