Hello I'm very new to Linux and shell scripting so I only know basic stuff. I'm making a script with the purpose of finding the longest string or word in a file. Here's what I got so far:
Code:
#!/bin/bash
longest=""
for i in $(strings -n $1); do
if [[ $longest < $i ]]
then
longest=$i
fi
done
echo $longest
So basically the script will use a file given in the command line which contains words and then return the longest one.
This is the file I'm using to test it out it's called test:
Code:
apples
are
the
best
in
the
world
now I run it with bash -x script2 test
so I can see what's happening and this is what I get:
Code:
+ longest=
++ strings -n 1 test
+ for i in '$(strings -n 1 $1)'
+ [[ '' < apples ]]
+ longest=apples
+ for i in '$(strings -n 1 $1)'
+ [[ apples < are ]]
+ longest=are
+ for i in '$(strings -n 1 $1)'
+ [[ are < the ]]
+ longest=the
+ for i in '$(strings -n 1 $1)'
+ [[ the < best ]]
+ for i in '$(strings -n 1 $1)'
+ [[ the < in ]]
+ for i in '$(strings -n 1 $1)'
+ [[ the < the ]]
+ for i in '$(strings -n 1 $1)'
+ [[ the < world ]]
+ longest=world
+ echo world
world
So by the looks of it it's just replacing the value of the current word with the next one.
So my question is how can I accurately compare the words so it returns the longest one?
I'm guessing my mistake is in this line:
#! /bin/bash
longest=""
charCount=0
while read x
do
if [ $charCount -lt ${#x} ]
then
charCount=${#x}
longest=$x
fi
done < $1
echo "Longest Word: $longest; Number of Chars: $charCount"
Otherwise it will break for filenames with spaces or strange characters..
Quote:
Originally Posted by SCB
[..]So by the looks of it it's just replacing the value of the current word with the next one.[..]
It is keeping the one that is lexically greater. If somehow the shorter string were padded with leading spaces to make them equal length, then your comparison would work, if you enclosed both variables in double quotes. But doing so would involve knowing the length of the larger of the two variables and that's what you were set to find out in the first place
Hi I tried the following string comparison script in Ksh88
#!/bin/ksh
str1='aC'
str2='ABC'
if
then
echo "Equal"
else
echo "Not Equal"
fi
Though str1 and str2 are not equal the script output says Equal .
Please correct me
Thanks (2 Replies)
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How do i compare two strings in shell script. Below is an example but I am not getting the desired output, plz help
if
then
echo success
fi
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, didn't know it would be so much easier using a while loop.