Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a tab delimited table with more than 126 columns. One of the columns however contains more than 90 characters and this makes the table really difficult to read. I know I can use awk and printf to format the width but then I'll need to write, $1, $2, $3, ...:

awk '{OFS = FS = "\t"} { printf "%-88s %s %-10s %-10s %-10s %-10s %-10s %-10s %-10s\n", $1,$2,$3,$4,$5,$6,$7,$8}'

I don't think this is the right way to do it. Is there a method where I can just simply format the width of one particular column?

Thank you.

How about this as an example:

Code:

$ cat infile
1,  103.3,8,Arlen Specter  ,0
2,   84.1,6,John McCain    ,0
3,   22.5,6,Arnold Schwarzenegger,0
4,    7.0,4,Dick Drubin    ,0

$ cat fix4
awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=","} {$4=sprintf("%-22s",$4); print}' infile

$ ./fix4
1,  103.3,8,Arlen Specter         ,0
2,   84.1,6,John McCain           ,0
3,   22.5,6,Arnold Schwarzenegger ,0
4,    7.0,4,Dick Drubin           ,0

Thanks for the help. sprintf, should spend a bit of time learning this.