Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a report that I'd like to print columns headers on. The code appears as follows:

Code:

gawk '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if ($i < 0) $i = -$i; print }'|gawk '{ printf "%-78s%-30s%-30s%-30s\n", $1,$2, $3, $4 }' |awk '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if ($i < 0) $i = -$i; print }' report_1020

I am trying to make it print a report with column headers and am really shaky with the BEGIN statement:

Code:

[gawk 'BEGIN {print "NAME RATE HOURS FINE\n"}' '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if ($i < 0) $i = -$i; print }'|gawk '{ printf "%-78s%-30s%-30s%-30s\n", $1,$2, $3, $4 }' |awk '{for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) if ($i < 0) $i = -$i; print }' report_1020

When I attempt to print this report what I get are nice columns but no report! I have tried to search on different sites but many give horizontal row headers and I am unable to find what to do next.

Awk gurus? If you could help.. greatly appreciated!

What I want to do is this:

Name Rate Hours Fine

Tracey 10 13 1
Burt 9 12 2

Good to see someone trying to learn awk, a powerful and useful language, though a bit strange until you learn the assumptions behind it.

All of the code needs to be inside the same ' ' block. By putting the next statement into a separate ' ' block you are telling awk that it's a filename.

Whenever you find yourself doing awk | awk | awk, you should probably stop and think how it can be done in one awk. (Usually but not always.)

What does your input look like? You've posted your output.. I think..

Your BEGIN statement is fine, but, as Corona688 says, continue the script in the same '...' block.

But, what are you doing there? In the first script, you are printing absolute values of fields, even if you know they're text strings. Not an error, but pointless. In the second script, all you do is formatting the output to some extreme wide, space padded columns. Not an error, but pointless if you pipe that to the next awk, which uses any number of spaces as field separator, so your formatting is gone. Plus, you again calculate absolute values, knowing that all numbers are positive from your first awk.

Try this (and consult the awk man page for the conditional assignments):

Code:

awk 'BEGIN {print "NAME RATE HOURS FINE\n"} { printf "%-78s%-30s%-30s%-30s\n", $1, ($2>=0)?$2:-$2, ($3>=0)?$3:-$3, ($4<0)?-$4:$4 }' report_1020

I see now what is wrong. It does need to continue as Corona said. I kept on typing and typing not noticing that the ' was what was stopping it from acting as it should and continuing to pick up the rest of the script. This was really helpful. I agree also my code is very messy and therefore everyone knows it is from a beginner; I will look at Rudi's examples to clean it up.