Question

I am trying to make a a simple script of finding the largest word and its number/length in a text file using bash. I know when I use awk its simple and straight forward but I want to try and use this method…lets say I know if a=wmememememe and if I want to find the length I can use echo {#a} its word I would echo ${a}. But I want to apply it on this below

for i in `cat so.txt` do

Where so.txt contains words, I hope it makes sense.

Answer 1

Normally, you’d want to use a while read loop instead of for i in $(cat), but since you want all the words to be split, in this case it would work out OK.

#!/bin/bash
longest=0
for word in $(<so.txt)
do
    len=${#word}
    if (( len > longest ))
    then
        longest=$len
        longword=$word
    fi
done
printf 'The longest word is %s and its length is %d.\n' "$longword" "$longest"