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I have simple awk command generating output and then sending an email:

awk '(NR==FNR){a[$2]=sprintf("%.2f",$1*value); next} {print $1,$2,a[$2]}' OFS="\t\t\t" value=$COST /tmp/1.txt /tmp/2.txt

however the last column is misaligned based on the second one:

510G                    /path/to/aaaaaaaaaaaaa/                 0.00
157G                    /path/to/bbbbbbbbb/                     0.00
253M                    /path/to/ccccccccccccccc/                        0.00
61M                     /path/to/dddddddd/                      0.00
16K                     /path/to/eeeee/                 0.00
8.0K                    /path/to/fffffffff/                     0.00

How can I enforce this to be always aligned? /path/to is static.

DisplayName
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1 Answers1

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You can pipe the output of your command to column -t to format any output to columns. The input needs to be delimited by whitespace, so you don't need to guess how many tabs you need to add.

For example, supposing a file contains this:

510G        /path/to/aaaaaaaaaaaaa/          0.00
157G                /path/to/bbbbbbbbb/                 0.00
253M           /path/to/ccccccccccccccc/                  0.00
61M                  /path/to/dddddddd/               0.00
16K                  /path/to/eeeee/             0.00
8.0K                /path/to/fffffffff/              0.00

the cat the.file|column -t command produces this output:

510G  /path/to/aaaaaaaaaaaaa/    0.00
157G  /path/to/bbbbbbbbb/        0.00
253M  /path/to/ccccccccccccccc/  0.00
61M   /path/to/dddddddd/         0.00
16K   /path/to/eeeee/            0.00
8.0K  /path/to/fffffffff/        0.00
Lacek
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  • I forgot to mention that I need multiple tab delimiters between columns. I've tried `column -t -s $'\t'` as well as `column -t -s $'\t\t\t'` but with no luck. Is it possible with `column` at all? – DisplayName Jan 04 '21 at 13:10
  • I don't think you can do it with `column`. However, you can use `column` to format the output, and then use `sed` to insert tabs between the columns. Not an elegant solution, for sure, but works. – Lacek Jan 04 '21 at 13:32