This is a purely aesthetic question, as I have a working command now, but I'd like to run wc -m against each element in my clients array without an explicit loop or running a subshell/child shell process. Bash is v5.0.18 running on macOS.
clients=(one two three)
printf '%s\n' "${clients[@]}" | xargs -I{} bash -c 'echo -n {} | wc -m' | sort -nr | head -1
After more googling, I found this nice piece of awk script:
printf '%s\n' "${clients[@]}" | awk '{print length}' | sort -nr | head -1
I find functions quite pleasing, if you're open to a non-one-liner solution:
length() {
echo ${#1}
}
map() {
func=$1
shift
for arg; do
$func "$arg"
done
}
max() {
read -r max
while read -r arg; do
(( arg > max )) && max=$arg
done
echo $max
}
and then
map length "${clients[@]}" | max
Using a pipeline is to execute a command in a subshell. You can avoid it like this with awk:
awk -v RS="[[:space:]]" 'length > len {len = length} END {print len}' <<<${clients[@]}
GNU awk only:
awk -v RS="[[:space:]]" '{D[NR]=length}; END {asort(D); print D[NR]}' <<<${clients[@]}
clientscontain unbalanced quotes, parentheses or any other shell control characters.