Shell Programming and Scripting

Oh yea, there it goes!

What about printing it in fixed length files? Meaning can I reserve, say, 10 specific spaces in the line to print this number?

I'm just learning here, btw

Ten specific spaces where? At the end? Not any easy way that I know of, though you could do it with enough programming.. if you know the number is always X digits long, the easiest would just be to stick it at the beginning of the line.

typeset -R10 number

will make number always 10 characters in length. You then need to use quotes to preserve the spaces. Like this...

echo "$number"

the number itself may not always be a specific amount of characters, but it is limited to how many characters it can be, this is up me how many I allow it to be.

For what I'm trying to do (import a fixed length file containing invoices), putting the number at the end or the begining, works fine. I was just curious about 'co-ordinates'

thanks oombera, I owe you many many many pints