How to find the length of a string variable in UNIX.

You may need to find the length of string or size of string variable in your shell script program. Here are the 5 best ways through which you can acheive it.

Above picture may clear you whole story if not please go in details as following.


Consider we have a variable name VAR and it stores a string "Hello" which length is 5.
VAR="Hello"

1) echo : In the bash we can use echo command as following .

VAR="Hello"
echo ${#VAR}
5

2) echo with wc : Second method is echo with wc with -c option as following.

VAR="Hello"
echo -n $VAR | wc -m
5

or

echo -n $VAR | wc -c
5

Note:
Where -m print the character counts and -c print the byte counts .

3) printf with wc : 3rd method is to use printf with wc as following.

printf $VAR | wc -c
5

or

printf $VAR | wc -m
5

4) echo with awk : 4th method is echo with awk as following.

echo $VAR | awk '{print length ;}'
5

5) expr : 5th method to use expr as following.

expr length $VAR
5

or

expr $VAR : '.*'
5

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