OT: Shell Script using Awk

[Josh Paetzel]

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David Allen wrote:
> On 11/1/08, Sahil Tandon <sahil at tandon.net> wrote:
>> David Allen <the.real.david.allen at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> My apologies for asking on this list, but I'm stuck without Perl and need
>>> to use awk to generate a report.
>>>
>>> I'm working with a large data set spread across multiple files, but to
>>> keep things simple, say I have A Very Long String that containing records,
>>> each delimited by a single space.  I need to print those records in
>>> columnar format, but with only 7 columns per line:
>>>
>>> record1  record2  record3  record4  record5  record6  record7
>>> record08 record09 record10 record11 record12 record13 record14
>>> ...
>> A small sh script:
>>
>> #!/bin/sh
>> awk ' {
>> for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) {
>>  printf("%s ", $i)
>>  if (i % 7 == 0) { printf("\n") }
>> }
>> if (NF % 7 != 0) { printf("\n") }
>> } ' input
> 
> An elegant solution if ever I read one.  The mod operator should have
> been the first thing that came to mind.
> 
> I'm not sure whether I need a class in remedial math, or remedial awk,
> but either way, my thanks for the solution.

Just in case you've never discovered column, piping the output of this
to column -t will get you nice formatting for free.

- --
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel

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