[SOLVED] Finding longest length of filename using wc and assigning variable

Issue

cd subdir1/subdir2

ineedthis=$(find subdir3/ -name "*.csv" | tr ' ' '_') ## assigning name of the file into this variable
echo -n $ineedthis | wc -c

I wanted to see the length of all the filename by assigning a variable called ineedthis and making changes such that I don't have any spaces between the names. Then, I tried to use echo -n to read the name only and count the characters to find the length of the name. However, when I try to use wc -c on the echo statement, it would give me the number of characters of the chunk, instead of giving me the length of each filename.

What I was hoping was:

# numbers indicating the length of filename

9 subdir3/saying/hello.csv
6 subdir3/saying/hi.csv
9 subdir3/nay/noway.csv
12 subdir3/nay/nomethod.csv
16 subdir3/nay/you_dont_say.csv

Solution

find subdir3/ -name "*.csv" |\
while read path; do
    $file=$(basename "$path")
    $len=$(echo -n "$file" | wc -c) 
    echo $len "$path"
done

• while loops over each path found by find
• basename strips off everything up to final / (optionally a suffix can also be removed. bash provides bultins like ${path##*/} and ${path%%.csv} that are similar)

Answered By - jhnc