How to print the longest word in a file by using combination of grep and wc

Question

iam trining to find the longest word in a text file. i tried it and find out the no of characters in the longest word in a file by using the command

wc -L

i need to print the longest word By using this number and grep command .

How many words per line do you have? With awk it might be easier — AwkMan, Jul 28 '16 at 15:21
have a look at this question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8962466/finding-the-longest-word-in-a-text-file — brad, Jul 28 '16 at 15:22
1 word per line. Iam using a standard file /usr/share/dict/words — Nitheesh MN, Jul 28 '16 at 15:25

chepner · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-28T15:55:23.613

3

If you must use the two commands give, I'd suggest:

grep -E ".{$(wc -L < test.txt)}" test.txt

The command substitution is used to build the correct brace expression to match the line(s) with exactly the given number of characters. -E is needed to enable extended regular expression support; otherwise, the braces need to be escaped: grep ".\{...\}" test.txt.

Using an awk command that makes a single pass through the file may be faster.

edited Jul 28 '16 at 15:55

answered Jul 28 '16 at 15:31

chepner

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Thanks; I verified that you needed either `-E` or escaped braces, but forgot to update the answer after the test. – chepner Jul 28 '16 at 16:01

How to print the longest word in a file by using combination of grep and wc

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