Any help would be appreciated,
Roman

You can use cut to do this:

cut -c 1-20 infile > outfile

will output the first 20 characters per line to outfile.

man cut

Chuck Demas
Needham, Mass.

--
  Eat Healthy    |   _ _   | Nothing would be done at all,
  Stay Fit       |   @ @   | If a man waited to do it so well,
  Die Anyway     |    v    | That no one could find fault with it.
  de...@tiac.net |  \___/  | http://www.tiac.net/users/demas

man cut

With GNU wc: wc -L file
Portably:    awk 'length > max { max=length } END {print max}'

                --Ken Pizzini