UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I have a name field in a file which is right justified (yep - its true). I need to strip the leading spaces from the field and write the name out left justified. Again, I think I need to use a sed or awk command but so far, my results are at best disappointing. Thank you in advance from a UNIX newbie.

I need to leave the other fields intact, even if they have spaces. Is there no way to give a start and end position for a UNIX command to look at ?

Thanks
MArcia P

Does this file have set columns? If so you could use awk to extract the last field in the file. If so, then you can use awk like this, if not, I'll defer until more info is provided:

cat file | awk '{print $5}' where $5 is the fifth column in the file.

Gawk allows you to specify field widths, strip leading spaces from a field and print out in a new format, e.g...

Code:

$ cat file1
1000          dingo1000
2000    bingo bongo2000

$ gawk 'BEGIN{FIELDWIDTHS="4 15 4"}{sub(/ +/,"",$2);printf "%4s%-15s%4s\n",$1,$2,$3}' file1
1000dingo          1000
2000bingo bongo    2000