UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there,
I really didn't want to have to waste people's time and ask this, but after 2 hours and running out of my own time I've decided to ask..

Basically I have a file in the format:

word: other words; more words here; last word
word: more words here; last word
(etc) x 100

Where the occurrence of other words/more words can be zero or more.

My aim is to count the amount of characters that come after the ':'.
My logic was simple, use awk to create a regex that equals from : to $ (i.e. from : to end of file). And then print its length.

I couldn't work out how to do that, but figured I'd be able to print a variable's length quite easily.
So I've been trying to assign a variable to the regex, and then print its length.
But I'm having trouble assigning a variable to a regex.
I feel as if there is some basic key concept I'm missing...

How do I do this?

I currently have:

awk '$var ~ /:.*$/ {print (length)var}' a.txt

Also if I wanted to print both the regex and its length, would it be:

{print (length)var, var}

I'm sure there's some basic concept or syntax I'm missing here, can someone please explain to me if you see easily why I'm going wrong?

Thanks heaps,

Code:

# awk -F":" '{print length($2)}' a.txt
40
3

Taking the colon as field separator. This works as long as there is only 1 colon per line. Blanks are included in the count in this example. Could delete all blanks before doing length().

Variables in awk are not written with a leading $. This is for specifying fields.

Thank you Zaxxon, can go from this :-)

Can you explain how I would have done my initial desire though, i.e. setting a variable to a regex?
Even if I remove the $ sign
awk 'var ~ /:.*$/ {print var}' a.txt didn't work

Thanks again,

The note about the $ was just generally.
In your code, you test the variable var to match the reg exp. Since var is not defined, it can never match. So the command inside the curly brackets (print) will never be executed.
In my example you could for further use store the length into a variable like this:

Code:

# awk -F":" '{var=length($2); print var}' a.txt