Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,
i want to print(f) the content of a file, but i don't know how many columns it has (i.e. it changes from each time my script is run). The number of columns is constant throughout the file.

Any suggestions?

Try to use NF of awk..

Thanks. I managed to write the following script:

Code:

#!/bin/bash

awk '{
for ( i=1; i<=NF; i++)
print $i }
' $1

Unfortunately all output is written in one column/field. I want it with the correct number of fields. This may sound awkward, and maybe it is, i could of course just do a 'print', but then i will not get a pretty listing when my values are of different lengths.

So, what i have is for example:

Code:

1021 203213 1.1E-03
114432 0.77 2.7e-08
1234 2020 5.0e-05

and i want a tab separated output f. ex:

Code:

1021    203213  1.1E-03
114432  0.77    2.7e-08
1234    2020    5.0e-05

Code:

#!/bin/bash

awk '{
  for ( i=1; i<=NF; i++)
     printf("%s%s", $i, (i==NF) ? "\n" : "\t")
}' $1

Great! Thanks!

This is just what I was looking for but ...
I used this and got an errors. I run it in ksh - does it matter ?

awk '{ for ( i=6; i<=NF; i++) printf("%s%s", $i, ($i==NF) "\n":"\t") }' ./ERRORS.txt
awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: illegal statement near line 1

Thanks

Sorry this was exactly what I run

$awk '{ for ( i=1; i<=NF; i++) printf("%s%s", $i,(i==NF) ? "\n" : "\t")}' ./ERRORS.txt
awk: syntax error near line 1
awk: illegal statement near line 1
$