How do you determine the record length of a file

[wvsa]

Greetings, running 11.0 how can I determine the record length of records in a file? Thankyou for your help..

[Rita C Workman]

If you want to know how many lines are in a file...

cat | wc -l

See manpage wc

Regards,
/rcw

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

# wc

will return three numbers which are the number of lines, the number of words, and the number of characters, respectively. Assuming you have fixed size records, then you could do the following to find the "record size" (including the newline character at the end of each record:

# wc file|awk '{print $3 / $1}'

...JRF...

[Rodney Hills]

Run-
awk '{if (length($0) > x) x=length($0)}END{print "Max rec len" x}' yourinputfile

This awk script will find the maximum record length in the file.