Shell Programming and Scripting

ok. this is a bit of a difficult question but i've been trying to figure this out for quite some time but couldn't.


how do I print columns on the screen?

like take for instant. using the ls and the file command, how do i print it so i can have the filenames on the left hand side and the type of contents that is in the file on the right hand side. something like this:


ls -l

file filename




foo.bar1 === data
foo.bar2 === data
foo.bar3 === executable script
foo.bar4 === command text


how can i print columns like that and have em actually be aligned properly?

i'm guessing the commands sed, awk, and tput would likely be used here but i cant figure out how to use them properly.

Depends exactly how you want the output, but...

Code:

$ file * | while IFS=":"; read line; do set -- $line; printf "%20s === %s\n" "$1" `echo $2 | tr -s ' ' | tr -d '\t'`; done 
               file1 === empty file
               file2 === ascii text
               file3 === executable shell script

Cheers
ZB

thank you very much. this works just fine.

i'm curious though, what does this part of ur script mean "printf "%20s "

i wanna be able to set more columns like that. like lets say 5 or 6. would that be possible? how would i tweak the above command to do that?

You can easily add more formatting specifiers in your invocation of printf.

Read (assuming a Linux box, just use -s <section_no> on solaris)

man 1 printf
man 3 printf

For more....

You might want to think about using awk for this if it starts to get more complex than a few fields though.

Cheers
ZB