That will remove at most one leading space. I don't have gawk on my system and awk on my system doesn't support the FIELDWIDTHS variable, so I can't test anything using it. But, neutronscott's suggestion might be a good starting point. (Have you tried it?)

It would seem that adjusting field 3 (with:

Code:

sub(/^ */, "", $3)

not:

Code:

sub(/^ /, "", $3)

) would line up field 3; but might not fix alignment of field 4.

Assuming field widths for your 1st three fields of 11 characters, 27 characters, and 26 characters (guessing from jvoot's sample output), the following should work with any awk that adheres to the POSIX standards' requirements (implementing a subset of the gawk field widths option using standard awk features):

Code:

awk -v FIELDWIDTHS='11 27 26 999' '
BEGIN {	nf = split(FIELDWIDTHS, fw)
	sc = 1
	for(i = 1; i < nf; i++) {
		fs[i] = sc
		sc += fw[i]
	}
}
{	for(i = 1; i < nf; i++) {
		f[i] = substr($0, fs[i], fw[i])
		gsub(/^ *| *$/, "", f[i])
		printf("%-*s", fw[i], f[i])
	}
	f[i] = substr($0, sc)
	gsub(/^ *| *$/, "", f[i])
	print f[i]
}' file

This should line up all fields as long as data from one field doesn't spill over into following fields (other than <space>s). This will align any number of fields (not just 4) with their sizes specified by the list provided in the FIELDWIDTHS variable. The last field width specified is unimportant. This code assumes that the last field starts at the calculated starting column (based on earlier field widths) and runs to the end of the line; no trailing spaces are included in the output of the last output field. With jvoot's sample input, it produces the output jvoot requested.

Note that many implementations of awk do not adhere to the standards when using substr() on fields that contain multi-byte characters. (The standards say that start and length parameters count characters; some awk implementations count bytes instead. As long as you're only dealing with single-byte characters, both work correctly.)

If you want to try this on a Solaris/SunOS system, change awk to /usr/xpg4/bin/awk.