Shell Programming and Scripting

Stop asking questions and start finding solution ... for you and others.

make things simper guys.

if i understand properly, u want the leading spaces of first column removed

try this
awk '{printf("%-12s %12s %22s\n",$1,$2,$3) ' filename > outfile
after u see the results u may modify the line accordingly
i have given a space between columns;

Hi again,
Well, I'm sorry to say it, but that doesn't give the expected output, at least not on my machine. The columns don't line up. And he also wanted headers, which was the reason for either two printf statements in an awk program or other AWKward cats and whiles and echoes... a seemingly complicaticated way to do it.
If it wasn't for the headers, Danmeros original solution would still have been the most correct:

Code:

awk '{printf "%-22s %-26s %s\n",$1,$2,3}' infile

or even

Code:

while read x y z;do printf "%-22s %-26s %s\n" $x $y $z;done < infile

I did an experiment: the latter is faster on my machine on small files (the actual content supplied by OP) but when the file is 100 times bigger the awk program is a lot faster, a 10th of the time. So the conclusion is that if You need a reason to go for a cup of cocoa, run the while loop. If You are anxious to get home at the end of the day, do the awk. It's several nanoseconds we're dealing with here dudes!

The point, in this case, is taking in the arguments with any program that ignores repeated whitespace and reformat it in the desired fashion. At least that's how I see it. And which I missed completely in my first attempts at cracking it, focusing on how to handle or convert whitespace.


/Lakris