formatting

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have file with different columns
for ex.

contents of file "txt"

NAME AGE MARKS
HARRY 23 89
TOM 12 67
BOB 23 11

and you see its not formatted.Now, I need the file "txt" to be formatted like

COLUMN1 COLUMN2 COLUMN3
NAME AGE MARKS
with proper spacing between them...

how to do this in shell scripting?

2

The fast way will be to replace space by tab's.

tr ' ' '\t' <  file
3

A more general solution is to use printf

while read name age marks; do
  printf "%-12s %2i %s\n" "$name" "$age" "$marks"
done <txt

It's simpler still if you use awk, because it will loop over each line by itself:

awk '{ printf "%-12s %2i %s\n", $1, $2, $3 }' txt

The widths (here, 12, 2, and unbounded) are obviously up to you to set to suitable values.

4

Hi.

A production-quality perl script for automatically aligning columns can be found at align: text column alignment filter, written by Steve Kinzler.

Although the title is text column ..., it right-adjusts if a field is numeric. There are command-line over-ride options for adjustment direction, along with numerous other features. I find it to be a very useful code ... cheers, drl