I needed to determine the length of the longest line in a file today. After overcoming the surprise that I can't recall ever needing to do such a thing before, I banged out this Perl script: 
use warnings;
use strict;

my $max = 0;
while (<>) {
    my $len = length;
    $max = $len if $len > $max;
}
print "$max\n";

[download]

Running the code on the following file would print 7. The trailing newline is included in the length of a line. 

a
abc
abcdef
abcd
abcde

[download]

Reflecting on the code over lunch, it occurred to me that that was way too many characters.

Here is my 38: 

              1         2         3        
     12345678901234567890123456789012345678

[download]
<Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>

Please show me how to slim this down.

In reply to Golf: Length of longest line in a file by toolic

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