[SOLVED] How can I align the columns of tables in Bash?

Issue

I want to format text as a table. I tried echoing with a '\t' separator, but it was misaligned.

Desired output:

a very long string..........     112232432      anotherfield
a smaller string                 123124343      anotherfield

Solution

printf is great, but people forget about it.

$ for num in 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1000000; do printf "%10s %s\n" $num "foobar"; done
         1 foobar
        10 foobar
       100 foobar
      1000 foobar
     10000 foobar
    100000 foobar
   1000000 foobar

$ for((i=0;i<array_size;i++));
do
    printf "%10s %10d %10s" stringarray[$i] numberarray[$i] anotherfieldarray[%i]
done

Notice I used %10s for strings. %s is the important part. It tells it to use a string. The 10 in the middle says how many columns it is to be. %d is for numerics (digits).

See man 1 printf for more info.

Answered By - UtahJarhead

Answer Checked By - Candace Johnson (WPSolving Volunteer)