Shell Programming and Scripting

when given a file name, im looking for the most efficient way to turn each letter of the file name into spaces.

for instance, the way im thinking of going about this is this:

Code:

MYFILE=check_disks.sh
CHANUM=$(echo ${MYFILE} | awk '{ print length }')
printf '%s\n' $CHANUM

as you can see here, i have about 3 commands that i believe can be combined into one. and im pretty sure the last printf command wouldn't work.

I must be missing the point. You show us a very inefficient script that uses two shells and an awk to print the number of characters in the value of a shell variable. I do not understand how this relates to turning each individual letter (which presumably does not include underscores and periods [and digits, but there aren't any digits in the given sample input]) into an unspecified number of <space> characters.

Please give us a clear specification of what you are trying to do, and tell us what operating system and shell you're using.

how do i print a specific number of spaces, which is equal to the number of characters in a name.

say a user specifies the name: check_disks.sh

there are 14 characters in the name "check_disks.sh".

i want to now print 14 spaces.

You mean like:

Code:

printf '%*s' ${#MYFILE} ''

Try also

Code:

echo "${A//?/ }"