<> == Is there a function to return the length of a string? == The fastest way, not requiring external programs (but not usable in Bourne shells): {{{#!highlight bash # POSIX "${#varname}" }}} (note that with `bash` 3 and above, that's the number of characters, not bytes, which is a significant differences in multi-byte locales. Behaviour of other shells in that regard vary). or for Bourne shells: {{{#!highlight bash # Bourne expr "x$varname" : '.*' - 1 }}} ({{{expr}}} prints the number of characters or bytes matching the pattern {{{.*}}}, which is the length of the string (in bytes for GNU `expr`). The `x` is necessary to avoid problems with `$varname` values that are `expr` operators) or: {{{#!highlight bash # Bourne, with GNU expr(1) expr length "x$varname" - 1 }}} (BSD/GNU {{{expr}}} only) This second version is not specified in [[POSIX]], so is not portable across all platforms. One may also use `awk`: {{{#!highlight bash # Bourne with POSIX awk awk 'BEGIN {print length(ARGV[1])}' "$varname" }}} (there, whether the length is expressed in bytes or characters depends on the implementation (for instance, it's ''characters'' for GNU awk, but ''bytes'' for `mawk`). ------ Similar needs: {{{#!highlight bash # Korn/Bash "${#arrayname[@]}" }}} Expands to the number of elements in an array. {{{#!highlight bash # Korn/Bash "${#arrayname[i]}" }}} Expands to the length of the array's element i. ---- CategoryShell