Printing formatted output using awk

Question

I used awk to generate the following output

   root | /root
   bin | /bin
   daemon | /sbin
   adm | /var/adm
   lp | /var/spool/lpd

My awk query is as follows

  head -n 5 /etc/passwd | awk ' BEGIN{ FS=":";OFS=" | "; } { print $1 , $6 } '

I want the output to be displayed in a formatted manner as below

   root   | /root
   bin    | /bin
   daemon | /sbin
   adm    | /var/adm
   lp     | /var/spool/lpd

Is it possible to achieve this using awk . Also , the code should work on multiple input fields delimited by |

Kent · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-19 12:52:26Z

2

try piping your awk result to column:

awk 'whatever'|column -t

answered Apr 19, 2016 at 12:52

Kent

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karakfa · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-19 12:59:18Z

1

awk solution will be using printf

awk -F: '{printf "%-15s | %s\n",$1,$6}' /etc/passwd

note that if you remove - sign you can right align the userids as well.

answered Apr 19, 2016 at 12:59

karakfa

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Ed Morton · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-19 16:16:56Z

0

$ cat tst.awk
BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS=" | " }
FNR<=5 {
    for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
        wid[i] = (wid[i] > length($i) ? wid[i] : length($i))
        val[NR,i] = $i
    }
}
END {
    for (rowNr=1; rowNr<=NR; rowNr++) {
        printf "%-*s | %-*s\n", wid[1], val[rowNr,1], wid[6], val[rowNr,6]
    }
}

The above calculates the max width of each field and then uses that when printing to make sure the fields are aligned properly regardless of the contents of your input file(s).

edited Apr 19, 2016 at 16:16

answered Apr 19, 2016 at 14:27

Ed Morton

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