Hi, I need to find max column lenth of each column in a file. for eg. if file has col1 col2 col3 xyz abc mnopq ab pq xx The output i need as col 1: 3, col2 :3 , col3 :4 please help, as in linux we can use wc -L but in UNIX AIX i couldn't find any command. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance

I am confused. In the GNU/Linux wc utility the -L (--max-line-length) argument prints the length of the longest line - not the length of the maximum column.

When the array entries are printed in the END statement, they often will not come out in numerical column order. But a little additional code can resolve that. awk '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++)    if ( length($i)>column[i] )        column[i]=length($i) } END { for (i in column)     print i, column[i] }' infile