from the desk of stinkpot

get length of a string in bash shell

October 3rd, 2006 by Lawrence David

to get the length of a string in the bash shell:

${#str_var}

Posted in Shell Scripting | 7 Comments »

if that was helpful ...

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7 Responses to “get length of a string in bash shell”

1. on 31 Oct 2008 at 2:44 pm   Alexander

   Great! The web is full of crappy complicated methods for getting the string length. This is the most simple and elegant one.

2. on 02 Aug 2009 at 10:10 pm   volpe

   I quote Alexander. Thank you!

3. on 14 Oct 2010 at 9:44 am   DAud_IcI

   Wow, this is awesome, thank you! Very elegant.

4. on 23 Apr 2011 at 8:25 am   Droidzone

   Thanks a lot..It helped

5. on 25 Jun 2011 at 11:24 am   GMorris

   Well, I have all the latest updates to BASH and all, and just upgraded my system a couple of months ago, so I know it can’t be a “backwards compatibility” problem. I tried this, and it returns:

   bash: 11: command not found…

   The “11″ IS the length of the string, and I tried it with different lengths which all are correct. I just don’t get where the alleged “error” is originating. Any ideas?

6. on 25 Jun 2011 at 11:37 am   GMorris

   Ahh, OK, I’ve figured this out. It works a lot better if you DO something with it, like “echo ${#str_var}”. I had used ‘expr length “$str_var”‘, so I was thinking along those lines as it returns the length without an ‘echo’. Duhh… I guess just because the ‘echo’ wasn’t in the post I assumed it would work the same way, but you know what they say about ‘ass u me’?

   Now I’ve succeeded in becoming a true idiot, and I feel like it too!

7. on 10 Jul 2011 at 11:24 am   mark

   thanks for this, simple and works.

   I saw so many posts that were doing

   echo $var | wc -c

   but the method you posted is a lot more simpler