UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello friends
Please help me to display the content of a file in specific aligned manner.
for ex.
the content of the file may be
[code]
>$TEST
WELCOME
HI
HELLO
UNIX
SHELL
SCRIPTING
>$
I want to display the content like

Code:

.
TEST                      WELCOME        HI
HELLO                   UNIX                 SHELL
SCRIPTING   ....
.

Here we need to consider the longest word of the file( in this ex SCRIPTING = 9),So after each word there should me some empty spaces,
ex: TEST has only 4 letters in it, So I need 5 empty space following TEST so 4+5 = 9...like this i need to display the content

( Here in this site the empty spaces are not coming)

Please help me to fix this..I'm trying this for since 10 days..couldn't figure it out...Thanks in advance...

Moderator's Comments:

Please use next time code tags for your code and data

If you had used code tags, you would have noticed it keeps spacing and indent format...

Ever considered using pr command ? (Its magic...)

Thanks

Code:

awk 'BEGIN{ORS=""} {printf("%-9s", $1)}' infile >outfile

But I need to print more than one word( say TEST , HI, HELLO) in a same line...
Like matrix format

---------- Post updated at 09:36 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:24 AM ----------

Sdf

Thanks for the help

I need the counter to be reseted when starting of every line..I mean the output line

Are there several files and for every file the longest word shall be the measure for the field length?

---------- Post updated at 10:25 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:42 PM ----------

@ rajmohan146

This script determines the longest word of the file and paddes the rest of the field with empty spaces according to the longest word of the file:

Code:

awk '{a[i++]=$1; if(length($1) > length(max)) max=$1;l=length(max)}  END{ for(j=1; j<=i;j++) printf("%"(l+1)"s,",a[j-1])}' infile > outfile

output

Code:

      TEST,   WELCOME,        HI,     HELLO,      UNIX,     SHELL, SCRIPTING,

Good luck!