UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm on HP-UX

This is not coreutils' printf.

Sorry, so lost here.
Do you mean I'm not supposed to use this?

You said:

Code:

awk {printf "%-4000s", $0} Temp_test1.dat

failed. We already knew that it would. If your awk can't handle long lines; the awk printf() function can't handle long lines either. But, the printf utility can probably handle long lines:

Code:

while IFS='' read -r x
do      printf '%-4000s' "$x"
done < inputfile.dat > outputfile.dat

or:

Code:

dd if=inputfile.dat of=outputfile.dat cbs=4000 block

Note that both of these will convert variable length, newline terminated lines into fixed length records with no line terminators. If you want fixed length LINES instead of RECORDS, use the while loop in your shell and change the printf format string to '%-4000s\n'.

Please enter $ printf "%-4000s", $variable at the command prompt (no awk!)

Here is why you have an awk problem:
There is a system configuration parameter LINE_MAX.

On some systems LINE_MAX is 2048 bytes. This limit applies to core unix utilities and tells them what the longest possible line in files is allowed. awk obeys this limit.

Code:

getconf

command will show you other limits, as well. Like the max number of bytes you can pass in a variable as an argument. Consider taking a peek at what it does for you.