Problem
What’s the best way to count all the characters in a bash variable? For example, if I had
"stackoverflow"
the final outcome should be
"13"
Asked by lacrosse1991
Solution #1
The amount of characters in a variable can be calculated using the $#VAR syntax.
Answered by SteveP
Solution #2
Use the wc utility with the -c option to print the byte counts:
$ SO="stackoverflow"
$ echo -n "$SO" | wc -c
13
For echo, you’ll need to use the -n (do not output the trailing newline) option. If not, the newline character will be tallied as well.
Answered by mihai
Solution #3
jcomeau@intrepid:~$ mystring="one two three four five"
jcomeau@intrepid:~$ echo "string length: ${#mystring}"
string length: 23
link Counting the number of characters in a sentence, the number of words, the length of the words, and the total length of the sentence
Answered by Raj
Solution #4
${#str_var}
where str var is the string you want to use.
Answered by aga
Solution #5
wc -m filename.txt can be used to count the number of characters in a file. I hope this information was useful.
Answered by Norbert Wupona
Post is based on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15596199/how-can-i-count-the-number-of-characters-in-a-bash-variable