UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

if think the poster is asking for something along the lines of:

Code:

awk 'awk 'NR == 1 { fields = NF} { printf "%s", $0 ; for ( i = NF +1; i <=fields ) { printf " \t"}; printf "\n"}' file > newfile

Thank you for the message..

The rows are of varying length. I want to append tabs at the end of each row by specifying the number of fields.

Let us say the number of fields are 50.
If row 1 has 10 values, I would like to append 40 tabs at the end.
If row 2 has 2 values, I would like to append 48 tabs at the end.
If row 3 has 50 values, no tabs should be appended.

I have a file which has 40 million rows. Is this a fast way to append delimiters? Can we make the script generic so that if we can pass a parameter like "tab" or "pipe" or "comma", it would append that delimiter...