I have to send a file to mainframe and before sending it, I have to execute the quote command to set the record length.
Since the file is dynamic, I do not know what the maximum size of a line could be.

Currently, I use the following function to get the Max Column Count. Since I use "sed" it takes a long time for big files.

GetMaxCols()
{
MAX_COL_SIZE=0
for line in `cat $1 | sed "s! !~!g"`
do
COL_COUNT=`echo $line | wc -c`
if [ "$COL_COUNT" -gt "$MAX_COL_SIZE" ]; then
MAX_COL_SIZE=$COL_COUNT
fi
done
echo $MAX_COL_SIZE
}


Any better ways to achieve this goal ?

Thanks in advance.

Try...

awk 'length>max{max=length}END{print max}' file1

Great. Worked fine.

Thanks.