Reading length of piped value? How can I check the length of a piped input? I'm trying: echo "A" | xargs sh -c 'echo ${#$1}' Also: echo "A" | xargs sh -c 'echo ${#\"$1\"}' Based on the answers here, for a non-pipe example.

As @steve wrote, just use `wc -c` to count the number of bytes. See `man wc` for other options.

**`echo` appends a newline to the end of output**, which is why you'll get one more character than you might expect when counting. Use `printf` to control output more strictly.