Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello

I'm manipulating a file, taking certain variables & printing them to an output file using awk (actually nawk because I'm using -v).

I now want to take a field from the input file & expand it to a pre-defined length by preceding the string with spaces. The field I'm picking up can be of variable length.

So some possible values of the field ($29 in my line of code below) are:

5.60
7.80
12.90
121.50

The resulting field has to be 20 chars in length. The first & second fields need 16 spaces at the start, the 3rd needs 15 & the last 14.

Can I do this manipulation in one nawk statement?

I currently have this ($MON is calculated earlier in the script). I know I can use length($29) but not sure where to go from there.

Code:

cat inputfile | nawk -F= -v mondate=$MON '{ printf "02CF"mondate"%s              SPSSP%s\n",$4,$29 }' > outputfile

Am I approaching this correctly?

I guess an alternative is to process the file after I've built up all the fields I need in nawk but would be good to do it in one line if that's possible (& maintainable ...).

My OS is Solaris 10.

Thanks, Chris

Hey,

To format the output in nawk, you can use printf,

Here is the sample implementation,

Code:

echo 'Input string'|nawk '{printf("%s %20s\n",$1,$2);}'

Ouput:

Input               string

If you want the strings to be left aligned, then probably you should use %-20s in printf,

Code:

echo 'Input string sample'|nawk '{printf("%s %-20s%s\n",$1,$2,$3);}'

Output:

Input string              sample

Use printf based on your requirement.

Cheers,
Ranga

I never knew that syntax! Much simpler than what I'd been expecting.

Thank you

And you can remove the cat inputfile - nawk '...' inputfile > outputfile will do and will do better...

UUOC - yes I know, bad practice .. I just find it easier to maintain like that.

Thanks though RudiC