Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi All,

I'm writing a script that provides a menu to manipulate records. I'm having a problem, however. The first option I'm writing is simply to display all of the records in a supplied file.

The supplied file ('records') currently contains sample data, this data is:

95671660:Jones:Sarah:45:sales manager
93272658:Smith:John:43:technical manager
98781987:Williams:Nick:35:computer officer
99893878:Brown:Sarah:12:electrician
95673456:Couch:David:26:chef
95437869:Anderson:Sarah:19:CEO

I need to display this data as standard output. It needs to be arranged in 5 columns, each left-justified. The column order is family name (i.e. Jones), first name, telephone number , department number (i.e. 45) and job title. In needs to be sorted in ascending alphabetical order of family name (i.e. Anderson, Brown etc.)

Basically, it should look (something) like this:

Code:

Anderson    Sarah   95437869   19   CEO
Brown       Sarah   99893878   12   electrician
Couch       David   95673456   26   chef
Jones       Sarah   95671660   45   sales manager
Smith       John    93272658   43   technical manager
Williams    Nick    98781987   35   computer officer

I've been trying various solutions using cut and gawk. It's an sh script. Honestly, though, it's getting stupid. Look:

Code:

                # Print records option.
                1)      echo -e "Debug: User has selected print option.\n"
                        #cut -f2 -d: records | sort
                        awk '$2 $3 $1 $4 $5 {print}' records
                        #cut -f3 -d: records
                        #cut -f1 -d: records
                        #cut -f4 -d: records
                        #cut -f5 -d: records
                        echo -en "\nPress Enter to continue... "
                        read
                        ;;

It's pretty obvious I haven't a clue how to use (g)awk properly, lol. I'm used to using cut for extracting single columns. I've never had to extract and format a table like this, using unix.

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance,
Wolfie

Have a look at the printf function in awk.

You can use printf to format the output, it should be something like:

Code:

awk -F":" '{printf("%-12s%-8s%-11s%-5s%s\n",$2, $3, $1, $4, $5)}' records | sort

Regards

Thanks very much Franklin, that's exactly what I was after!