UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

hello there,
Thank you for any help you may offer.
I have the fallowing command

echo `ls -1 /Volumes/ximage2/$line/images/ | wc -l` $line

which give me the number of sub directories followed by the name of the parent directory of interest to me.

it ends up looking like this

1 W1GS56158
8 W1GS61404
11 W1KG1132
2 W1KG606
1 W1KG802

I would like it to seperate the results into columns instead so that the w's always align

Try protecting the spaces in the wc output with double-quotes

echo "`ls -1 /Volumes/ximage2/$line/images/ | wc -l` $line"

That should give you a left-justified line count but everything should in columns.

Use printf to format the output:

Code:

printf "%5s %s\n" `ls /Volumes/ximage2/$line/images/ | wc -l` "$line"

If your shell doesn't support printf, use the printf command of awk:

Code:

awk 'BEGIN{printf("%5s %s\n"), '`ls /Volumes/ximage2/$line/images/ | wc -l`', '"$line"')}'

Regards