hi all,
im having a problem with using perl printf. my requirement is to print a string (like [OK]) at the right most end of the screen.
i tried this perl script, but it fails with an error;
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my $scrW = 0;
my $str = `stty size`; # get the screen character width
$str =~ m/(\d+)\s*$/; # extract the char width
$scrW = eval($1); # put the char width in a varable $scrW
$scrW -=10; # reduce the char width by 10
printf "%($scrW)s\n", "abcde";
tried to use printf with a variable as indentation length, but fails.
this type of method works in bash.
does anyone have an idea ?
You don't need the eval, just assign $1 to $scrW. And take out the parentheses in the printf. You then need braces around the variable name to disambiguate the variable name from the traliing s, like ${scrW}s
If you subtract ten, you obviously don't use the entire screen width, but I guess you know that.
thankx era for the quick reply,
i subtracted ten thinking that the length of the string im gonna print is 10.
what u said worked , but i still had to use the eval.
anyway, thankx for the solution.
printf already does the subtraction for you; a positive number in %72s says pad with spaces as much as necessary to fill to the right up to, here, 72 characters width.
, but i still had to use the eval.