row to column and position data in to fixed column width

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Dear friends,

Below is my program and current output. I wish to have 3 or 4 column output in order to accomodate in single page. i do have subsequent command to process after user enter the number.

Program

COUNT=1
for MYDIR in `ls /`
do
  VOBS[${COUNT}]=${MYDIR}
  echo "${COUNT}. ${MYDIR}"
  COUNT=expr ${COUNT} + 1
done

Current Output

 
1. BA
2. GTE
3. IBM
4. VB
5. file
6. folder
8. kernal
9. lost+found
10. mnt
11. net
12. opt
13. platform
14. proc
15. profile.new
16. sbin
17. scripts
18. tmp
19. var
20. vol
21. ......etc

Desired output

I tried used other alternatives like nawk etc. But it displays either separated by tab or space. I would like to print fixed intervals irespective of data width.

Please find attached image

2

You can achieve this Perl using the following code

opendir DIR,"." or die "Can't open dir : $!\n";
while (my $files=readdir(DIR))
{

if ($files=~/^\./) #this is for avoiding the . and .. default files
{
    next;
}
print "$count) $files\t";
if ( $count % 3 == 0 )
{
    print "\n";
}
$count++;
}

The above code will list all the files in the current directory.
It will display 3 files per line.

The sample output I got is as follows

1) xac  2) dir.pl       3) func.sh
4) xad  5) sc.sh        6) xae
7) xab  8) test.sh      9) split.sh
10) xaa
3

Hi baluchen,
You can achieve this by some small changes in your script .For the formatted output just use the printf .Check the count according to then move the line ( Here I check for the three elements in a line.

COUNT=1
for MYDIR in `ls /`
do
VOBS[${COUNT}]=${MYDIR}
printf "%-25s" "${COUNT}. ${MYDIR}"
let SPLIT=`expr ${COUNT} % 3`
if [ $SPLIT -eq 0 ]
then
        echo
fi
let COUNT=${COUNT}+1
done
4

Excellent..

Thanks Karthi and Thillai

It worked as i expected.

5 
ls / |awk '{print NR".", $0}'