wc's Lesser Known -L Option

wc is well known for giving you word, line and character counts of a file or standard input.

Today I Learned wc can also tell you the length of the longest line in a file with the -L flag!

$ cat file.txt
  one
  two
  three

$ wc -L file.txt
  5 file.txt

Man pages are full of useful information and trivia. Did you know wc has been around since Unix Version 1?

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