awk command returns inconsistent result

Question

I have a script which performs several validations in a file. One of the validation is to check if a line exceeds 95 characters (including spaces). If it does, it will return the line number/s where the line exceeds 95 characters. Below is the command used for the validation:

$(cat $FileName > $tempfile)
totalCharacters=$(awk '{print length($0);}' $tempFile | grep -vn [9][4])
if [[$totalCharacters != "" ]]; then
  totalCharacters=$(awk '{print length($0);}' $tempFile | grep -vn [9][4] | cut -d : -f1 | tr "\n" ",")
  echo "line too long"
  exit 1
fi

In the lower environment the code is working as expected. But in production, there are time that the validation returns the error "line too long" but does not return any line number. We just reran the script and it does not return any error.

I would like to know what could be wrong in the command used. The previous developer who worked on this said that it could be an issue with the use of the awk command, but I am not sure since this is the first time I have encountered using the awk command.

Answer 1

This is not well written. All you need is:

awk 'length>94{print NR; f=1} END{exit f}' file

If there are lines longer than 94 chars, it will print the line numbers and the exit with status 1; otherwise the exit status will be 0 and no output will be generated.

Answer 2

Your script should just be:

awk '
    length()>95 { printf "%s%d", (c++?",":""), NR }
    END { if (c) {print "line too long"; exit 1} }
' "$FileName"