Right align file

Question

I need function for right-aligning my file. Could you give me some hint or suggestion? Thanks.

Answer 1

while read line
do
  printf '%80s\n' "$line"
done < infile.txt > outfile.txt

Answer 2

I can only think of one way to answer this question:

 % ./4168932.awk ./4168932.awk        
                      #!/usr/bin/awk -f

                                      {
                           a[++n] = $0;
            if (length(a[n]) > width) {
                   width = length(a[n])
                                      }
                                      }

                                  END {
              format = "%" width "s\n";
    for (line = 1; line <= n; ++line) {
                 printf format, a[line]
                                      }
                                      }

Answer 3

Edit:

Actually, you don't need to reverse the lines:

printf -v spaces "%80s" " "; man rev | sed "s/^/$spaces/;s/.*\(.\{80\}\)\$/\1/"

Original:

Reverse the lines, pad them, truncate them and reverse them back.

man rev | rev | sed '1{x;s/^$/          /;s/^.*$/&&&&&&&&/;x};G;s/^\(.\{81\}\).*$/\1/;s/\n//' | rev

Output:

  REV(1)                    BSD General Commands Manual                   REV(1)

                                                                            NAME
                                          rev — reverse lines of a file or files

                                                                        SYNOPSIS
                                                                  rev [file ...]

                                                                     DESCRIPTION
              The rev utility copies the specified files to the standard output,
        reversing the order of characters in every line.  If no files are speci‐
                                               fied, the standard input is read.

                                                                    AVAILABILITY
           The rev command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available
                       from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.

  BSD                             March 21, 1992                             BSD

Here's another way to do the same thing:

printf -v spaces "%80s" " "; man rev | rev | sed "s/\$/$spaces/;s/^\(.\{80\}\).*$/\1/" | rev

Answer 4

You will need to detect the maximum length of a line in your file, and to write a function to pad lines with spaces to this length.