Echoing

I was just wondering how you would echo out different length variables but still have them all line up. I tried putting tabs between the variables but that didn't work as planned.

For example this is in some loop, with different variables in it each time:

echo "$1 $2 $3 $4 $5"

Appears like this:

The house is on the beach.
It is up on the hill.
Up in the clouds.

When I want it to be:
The....house..is......on.....the.....beach.
It.......is........up.....on.....the.....hill.
Up......in.......the.....clouds.

Thanks in advance.

Take a look at the printf command. There are many options available to set column width and data type.

Think about using printf instead of echo and putting the strings in fixed-length fields.

check your IFS

IFS=""