Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi
I'm trying to display the output of my script in a friendly viewable format.

it's something like this..
i have this while loop... in which i get some records from a file where fields are delimitered with a pipe. so i'm extacting each field and replacing the pipe with a \t, tab !!..
cat result.txt | while read line
do
sno=`expr $sno + 1`
echo $sno"\t" $line | cut -f 1,2,3,4 -d "|" | tr '|' ' \t '
done

The problem is I have a column header which i'm using to display at the output. but the display is going wayward.

i want it like
------------------------------------------
SNO FIELD1 FIELD2 FIELD3 FIELD4
------------------------------------------
1 -43242 xxxx qwer aaaa
2 1234 yyyy rrrr rrrr
3 345 er ert eer
------------------------------------------

but now i'm getting
------------------------------------------
SNO FIELD1 FIELD2 FIELD3 FIELD4
------------------------------------------
1 -43242 xxxx qwer aaaa
2 1234 yyyy rrrr rrrr
3 345 er ert eer
------------------------------------------

so when ever the minus/hipen sign appears in second field this problem is happening... can you tell be a better way out pleaseeeeee???

I think the alignment in the posted message is also not proper... i just want it below each column header !!

is this sufficient?
tr '|' '\t' < result.txt

yeah Thats what i have tried but its not happening !!!..

works fine for me - Solaris 9.
try: tr '\|' '\t' < result.txt

i'm doing it in AIX Version 4.3..
the problem is..
i have header like this..
echo "SNO\tFIELD1\tFIELD2\tFIELD3\tFIELD4"
and the file which i'm reading has
AAA|-6910640|DD|JONNY WALKER|
BBB|4153359|DD|JOHN MC|
CCC|3429780|H4|DURLEY YOLANDA|

read this line by line and replace pipe with \t then its not displaying one below the other...

not exatly what you wanted, but....

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

format='%-5.5s %-10.10s %-10.10s %-15.15s %-s'
printf "${format}\n" SNO FIELD1 FIELD2 FIELD3 FIELD4

nawk -F'|' -v OFS='' -v format="$format" '{printf format "\n", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5}' result.txt