Can anyone help me how do i find the size of a file in bytes. I know -s <filename> returns the size in bytes but how do i get that in a variable. Also, how do i equate a variable to a newline character in shell program. For eg: if [ "$line" == "\n" ] Somehow the above statement doesnt work when i try to check for the newline character in my program. Thanks.

i don't want to use sed, awk or perl in my shell script. so, please suggest an altenative.

First, test -s <file name> doesn't return the file size. It returns true if the file exists and the size is greater than zero. a way is to look at the 5th field of a long listing: if [ -s my.file ] then myvar=`ls -l my.file|awk ' { print $5 } '` echo $myvar fi Regarding your second question, how about using test's -z option? This returns true if the length of line is zero: read line if [ -z $line ] then echo "null" fi

the closest you can get, AFAIK, without using sed/awk/perl is use wc -c eg wc -c filename.txt output: 4096 filename.txt