UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

UNIX gurus:

Following is what I am trying to do:

I need to create a control file for another file that I am creating. The information needed in the control file is the date in YYYYMMDD format and then the number of records in the other file right justified and lpadded with spaces of 20.

So say I have a file a.dat and it has 200 records.
I need to create a control file a.ctl having the following data.

20060605 200

I can only use UNIX commands as I am not allowed to use any scripts. I know date +'%Y%m%d' will give me the date in YYYYMMDD format and wc -l <filename> would give me record count but how would I go about piping the output of the above to one control file?

What did you try? What shell are you using? This is bash, but should also work in ksh...

Code:

printf '%s%20s\n' $(date '+%Y%m%d') $(wc -l < a.dat) > a.ctl

Brilliant!! Thanks man it works!!

Im using ksh. i had tried a combination of cut, wc -l and date...but couldnt get it to work like u have. Could you explaina little bit more of what the above is really doing.
I am not able to figure out what the %s20s\n is doing?

%s%20s

This is a format string - it tells how to format the arguments to printf
%s = a string
%20s = a string 20 characters long padded to 20 characters.

man printf

... out of curiosity, why is this?
A script is nothing but a series of unix commands.

Its just the way the standards have been set. They dont want me creating any scripts on the box.

Thanks everyone.