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Length of Variable in Shell

Hi,
I am grepping Data from log file and assigning it to a Variable. Now I need to know length or count of that Variable. Can anyone let me know how??

I mentioned Count because I am grepping the filenames into Var . For example when we print that Variable data would be:

FILE1
FILE2
FILE3..

Gerwin Jansen

There is a few ways you can do this. Let's say the variable that contains your grepped data is called result. You can determine the length of result like this:

user@VMMINT01 ~/tmp $ result="this is the result"
user@VMMINT01 ~/tmp $ echo $result
this is the result
user@VMMINT01 ~/tmp $ expr length "$result"
18
user@VMMINT01 ~/tmp $ echo ${#result}
18

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Gerwin Jansen

Or assign the lengt to a variable:

user@VMMINT01 ~/tmp $ result_len=`expr length "$result"`
user@VMMINT01 ~/tmp $ echo $result_len
18

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new_perl_user

ASKER

I tried the above suggestion, but it is printing the wrong count/length.
There are only 3 filenames in the file but it is showing 5.

Anacreo

Are you working in Perl or some shell scripting language like KSH, SH, CSH?

For most scripting languages you could do something like:

$length=`echo $var | wc -l`
(count lines)

$length=`echo $var | wc -c`
(count characters)

new_perl_user

ASKER

Hi

Below is the script I am using.. I want to get the count into a variable so that I can populate that into an email subject showing the count of file names

#!/bin/bash

i=$(egrep -v "^$|[/]$" /usr/home/Test/Files/test_`date +%Y%m%d`_mhl.txt);
echo "$i"\n;
$length ='echo $i|wc -l';

Anacreo

Try it this way:

i=$(egrep -v "^$|[/]$" /usr/home/Test/Files/test_`date +%Y%m%d`_mhl.txt);
echo "$i";
length=$(echo $i|wc -l);
echo $length;

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new_perl_user

ASKER

Above one is giving the count of file it is grepping instead of count of Filenames within the file.

So right now it is grepping "1" file to read so the output is 1.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Anacreo

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