Shell Programming and Scripting

requirement : I need to read a text file and find out which particular line has highest charcters on it using the shell script.

I tried & was able to find out only for one line. I could not able to find out for the entire the line.

Code:

sed -n '10 p' ctstest.sh | wc -w

Please guide me out to how to read the entire file and find out the highest character present in the file.

What do you define to be the "highest" char?

Try

Code:

awk '{print NR, length}' file

which will print the number of characters per line (excluding newlines)

or

Code:

awk '{l=length} l>m{m=l; n=NR} END{print "line " n ": " m " characters"}' file

Which will print the line number with the highest number of characters (excluding newlines) ...

Hello ramkumar15,

I have a few to questions pose in response first:-Most importantly, What have you tried so far?

There are probably many ways to achieve most tasks, so giving us an idea of your style and thoughts will help us guide you to an answer most suitable to you so you can adjust it to suit your needs in future.


We're all here to learn and getting the relevant information will help us all.

How about:-

Code:

#!/bin/ksh
i=0
while read line
do
   ((i=$i+1))
   printf "Line $i\t "${#line} characters\n"
done < file

It depends what you actually want. The thread title isn't exactly useful either.


Regards,
Robin

hi rudic,

My requirement is to findout the highest number of characters used in the line in a particular text file and only the highest particual line need to be printed on it.

Hi rbatte,

Thanks for your inputs. I will make sure to try myself.

Hi scrutizer,
Thanks for your inputs.

So, if you sort the output by the character count, you can get the line number. Do you want the content from that line? Using sed can extract that for you.


Let us know how you get on.



Regards,
Robin