UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I didn't notise in the post "awk sed or paste" a right justifying charachter. IS there one? My fields looks like this:

cis101 01 Microcomputer Applications 11:00
cis101 02 Microcomputer Applications 9:00
cis101 DL Microcomputer Applications 7:00
cis106 01 Introduction to Programming 10:00
cis106 02 Introduction to Programming 12:00
cis111 01 Internet and Web Authoring 9:00
cis111 02 Internet and Web Authoring 6:00
cis115 01 Object Oriented Prog 11:00
cis120 01 Using SQL Server 10:00
cis136 01 Introduction to Unix 6:00
cis162 01 Java I 9:00
cis168 01 Web Graphics 1:00
cis172 01 Visual Basic I 10:00
cis236 01 Database Management 12:00
cis262 01 Java II 9:00
cis272 01 Visual Basic II 1:00

and I can't seem to get the time column to line up

Any suggestions?
R

Use a numeric value to print the number of spaces desired before the character(s) being printed. Use a - to reverse the justification. Using a . to represent a space you can see the effect..

printf "%4s", "foobar"

prints . . . . foobar

and

printf "%-4s", "foobar"

prints foobar. . . .

Also note, in awk, an integer constant followed by a $ is a positional specifier. Normally, format specifications are applied to arguments in the order given in the format string. With a positional specifier, the format specification is applied to a specific argument, instead of what would be the next argument in the list. Positional specifiers begin counting with one. Thus:

printf "%s %s\n", "don't", "panic"
printf "%2$s %1$s\n", "panic", "don't"



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