formatting textfile inside ksh script using awk not working

UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
1

I cannot seem to get this text file to format. Its as if the awk statement is being treated as a simple cat command.
I manned awk and it was very confusing. I viewed previous posts on this board and I got the same results as with the
the awk command statement shown here. Please help.

<<<contents of msgfile.txt>>>
$ cat msgfile.txt
Firstname1,Lastname1,Initial
Firstname2,Lastname2,Initial2
Firstname3,Lastname3,Initial3
Firstname4,Lastname4,Initial4
Firstname5,Lastname5,Initial5

<<<program code - this needs to be within ksh>>>
#!usr/bin/ksh

awk -F":" '{ print $1 "\t" $2 "\t" $3 }' msgfile.txt

<<<script output>>>
$ ksh tmail2.ksh
Firstname1,Lastname1,Initial
Firstname2,Lastname2,Initial2
Firstname3,Lastname3,Initial3
Firstname4,Lastname4,Initial4
Firstname5,Lastname5,Initial5

2

should be,

awk -F"," '{ print $1 "\t" $2 "\t" $3 }' msgfile.txt

because the columns are seperated by a comma.

Output:

3

Since i like using printf for formatting in awk , you can try this also,

awk -F"," '{printf"%-20s %-20s %-20s\n",$1,$2,$3}' msgfile.txt

Output:

4

Or:

{ IFS=',';printf "%s\t" $(<infile);printf "\n";}
5 
# awk 'BEGIN{FS=",";OFS="\t"}{print $1,$2,$3}' file
Firstname1      Lastname1       Initial
Firstname2      Lastname2       Initial2
Firstname3      Lastname3       Initial3
Firstname4      Lastname4       Initial4
Firstname5      Lastname5       Initial5
6

Thanks for all the help! It works now.

7

Another way though your problem is solved using awk

$ tr ',' '\t' < msgfile.txt