Longest line in a file

Question

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

Answer 1

awk '{ if (length($0) > max) {max = length($0); maxline = $0} } END { print maxline }'  YOURFILE

Answer 2

cat filename|awk '{print length, $0}'|sort -nr|head -1

For reference : Finding the longest line in a file

Answer 3

Here are references of the anwser

cat filename | awk '{print length, $0}'|sort -nr|head -1

http://wtanaka.com/node/7719

Answer 4

In perl:

perl -ne 'print ($l = $_) if (length > length($l));' filename | tail -1

this only prints the line, not its length too.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

Just for fun, here's the Powershell version:

cat filename.txt | sort length | select -last 1

And to just get the length:

(cat filename.txt | sort length | select -last 1).Length

Answer 7

Using wc (GNU coreutils) 7.4:

wc -L filename

gives:

101 filename

Answer 8

wc -L < filename

gives

101