How to print the number of characters in each line of a text file

Question

I would like to print the number of characters in each line of a text file using a unix command  I know it is simple with powershell  gc abc txt         length    but I need unix command

User · Accepted Answer

Use Awk   awk    print length    abc txt

User · Answer

I ve tried the other answers listed above  but they are very far from decent solutions when dealing with large files -- especially once a single line s size occupies more than  1 4 of available RAM   Both bash and awk slurp the entire line  even though for this problem it s not needed  Bash will error out once a line is too long  even if you have enough memory   I ve implemented an extremely simple  fairly unoptimized python script that when tested with large files   4 GB per line  doesn t slurp  and is by far a better solution than those given   If this is time critical code for production  you can rewrite the ideas in C or perform better optimizations on the read call  instead of only reading a single byte at a time   after testing that this is indeed a bottleneck   Code assumes newline is a linefeed character  which is a good assumption for Unix  but YMMV on Mac OS Windows  Be sure the file ends with a linefeed to ensure the last line character count isn t overlooked   from sys import stdin  exit  counter   0 while True      byte   stdin buffer read 1      counter    1     if not byte          exit       if byte    b  x0a           print counter-1          counter   0

User · Answer

Here is example using xargs     xargs -d   n  -I  sh -c  echo     wc -c   lt  file

User · Answer

while IFS  read -r line  do echo    line   done  lt  abc txt   It is POSIX  so it should work everywhere   Edit  Added -r as suggested by William   Edit  Beware of Unicode handling  Bash and zsh  with correctly set locale  will show number of codepoints  but dash will show bytes   so you have to check what your shell does  And then there many other possible definitions of length in Unicode anyway  so it depends on what you actually want   Edit  Prefix with IFS  to avoid losing leading and trailing spaces

User · Answer

Try this   while read line     do         echo -e  wc -m       done  lt abc txt

[shell] How to print the number of characters in each line of a text file

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