Hey guys need your help with an gawk script... here's what I have so far

gawk '^d/ {printf "%-20s %-10s %-10s %-10s %-4s%2s %5s\n",$9,$1,$3,$4,$6,$7,$8}' ls.kbr

The file ls.kbr is a capture of 'ls-al'

What I want gawk to do is:
1) Find only directories (this is working)
2) skip lines beginning containing . and .. directories
3) skip lines where the directory name is longer than 8 characters
4) determine the longest length of each field, and use that
length as a width specifier for each %s in printf(). You can see I'm
hardcoding the length for now.

TIA
Zoo591

ls -la | awk '/^d/ && length($9) <= 8 {
          if ( $9 == "." || $9 == "..") next;
          F[++j]=$0;
          if (max1 < length($9)) max1=length($9);
          if (max2 < length($1)) max2=length($1);
          if (max3 < length($3)) max3=length($3);
          if (max4 < length($4)) max4=length($4);
          if (max5 < length($6)) max5=length($6);
          if (max6 < length($7)) max6=length($7);
          if (max7 < length($8)) max7=length($8);
}
END{ for (i=1; i<=j; i++)
   {
    split(F[i], M);
    printf "%-*s %-*s %-*s %-*s %-*s%*s %*s\n", max1, M[9], max2, M[1], max3, M[3], max4, M[4], max5, M[6],max 6, M[7],max7, M[8]
   }
}'

Originally Posted by zoo591 Hey guys need your help with an gawk script... here's what I have so far gawk '^d/ {printf "%-20s %-10s %-10s %-10s %-4s%2s %5s\n",$9,$1,$3,$4,$6,$7,$8}' ls.kbr The file ls.kbr is a capture of 'ls-al' What I want gawk to do is: 1) Find only directories (this is working) 2) skip lines beginning containing . and .. directories 3) skip lines where the directory name is longer than 8 characters 4) determine the longest length of each field, and use that length as a width specifier for each %s in printf(). You can see I'm hardcoding the length for now. TIA Zoo591

Nicely done. You are numero uno AWK!