CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unixawk
Zama Ques
Zama Ques

Reputation: 1544

Printing formatted output using awk

I used awk to generate the following output 

   root | /root
   bin | /bin
   daemon | /sbin
   adm | /var/adm
   lp | /var/spool/lpd

My awk query is as follows

  head -n 5 /etc/passwd | awk ' BEGIN{ FS=":";OFS=" | "; } { print $1 , $6 } '

I want the output to be displayed in a formatted manner as below

   root   | /root
   bin    | /bin
   daemon | /sbin
   adm    | /var/adm
   lp     | /var/spool/lpd

Is it possible to achieve this using awk . Also , the code should work on multiple input fields delimited by |

Upvotes: 0

Views: 61

Answers (3)

Ed Morton
Ed Morton

Reputation: 204731

$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS=" | " }
FNR<=5 {
    for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
        wid[i] = (wid[i] > length($i) ? wid[i] : length($i))
        val[NR,i] = $i
    }
}
END {
    for (rowNr=1; rowNr<=NR; rowNr++) {
        printf "%-*s | %-*s\n", wid[1], val[rowNr,1], wid[6], val[rowNr,6]
    }
}

The above calculates the max width of each field and then uses that when printing to make sure the fields are aligned properly regardless of the contents of your input file(s).

Upvotes: 0

karakfa
karakfa

Reputation: 67567

awk solution will be using printf

awk -F: '{printf "%-15s | %s\n",$1,$6}' /etc/passwd

note that if you remove - sign you can right align the userids as well.

Upvotes: 1

Kent
Kent

Reputation: 195289

try piping your awk result to column:

awk 'whatever'|column -t

Upvotes: 2

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