UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

i have a file and i need the text to line up
currently the file looks like so


job scheduled complete
12 12:00 wendsday
13 1:00 wednsday

its a text file but not sure how to manipulate the file for it to line up

For example:

$ cat ick4 | awk '{printf("%5s %10s %10s\n", $1,$2,$3)}'

You can change the justification with - for example:

$ cat ick4 | awk '{printf("%-5s %-10s %-10s\n", $1,$2,$3)}'

Cheers,
Keith

thankyou that helped alot would you mind explaining that command a little bit i almost understand it all
but i am very new to unixand nice web page in the making

The cat command reads the file passed to it and outputs it to standard out. However, in this case, its is "piped" to the command awk. By piped I mean, the output of the command cat is passed as input to the command awk.

The awk programming language uses regular expressions and pattern matching. Its a great tool for parsing text files and the like. The printf statement has the general form:

printf format, expr[1], expr[2], . . ., expr[n]

where format is a string that contains both information to be printed and specifications on what conversions are to be performed on the expressions in the argument list, as in ``awk printf conversion characters''. Each specification begins with a %, ends with a letter that determines the conversion, and may include:
- (the dash) is used to Left-justify an expression in its field.
Character Prints expression as
c single character
d decimal number
e [-]d.ddddddE[+-]dd
f [-]ddd.dddddd
g e or f conversion, whichever is shorter, with nonsignificant zeros suppressed
o unsigned octal number
s string
x unsigned hexadecimal number
% print a %; no argument is converted


Below are some examples of printf statements along with the corresponding output:

printf "%d", 99/2 49
printf "%e", 99/2 4.950000e+01
printf "%f", 99/2 49.500000
printf "%6.2f", 99/2 49.50
printf "%g", 99/2 49.5
printf "%o", 99 143
printf "%06o", 99 000143
printf "%x", 99 63
printf "|%s|", "January" |January|
printf "|%10s|", "January" | January|
printf "|%-10s|", "January" |January |
printf "|%.3s|", "January" |Jan|
printf "|%10.3s|", "January" | Jan|
printf "|%-10.3s|", "January" |Jan |
printf "%%" %

The default output format of numbers is %.6g; this can be changed by assigning a new value to OFMT. OFMT also controls the conversion of numeric values to strings for concatenation and creation of array subscripts.