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

Variation on the theme.

This one will show all lines having the length of the longest line found in the file, retaining the order they appear in the source.

FILE=myfile grep `tr -c "\n" "." < $FILE | sort | tail -1` $FILE

So myfile

x
mn
xyz
123
abc

will give

xyz
123
abc