How do you find the potential size of a file after a grep/cut in Bash?

Question

Let's say you have a very large file with 30 columns, of differing sizes, and you cut out 6 of them. Can you determine the size of the new file that would actually have those 6 columns?

Answer 1

You can use wc:

grep pattern file | wc -c

It will return number of bytes.