awk help needed

[Andrew Beal]

Hi,

I am trying to write a script that will stagger the output below 6 fields accross separated by white spaces then create a new line until all of stdout has been appended in this format to a file.

example of output to be formatted... (only the file names field are to be formatted).

[root@melhpux3] /home/beala01-> du -sk ./*
7 ./Navimon.cfg
651 ./RPGC.prn
5 ./agent.config
8 ./audit-hpux-10092003.sh
29 ./benstat-dc.pri
2 ./bin/
7 ./class-users.csv
0 ./crap.out
0 ./crap/
1 ./default
7467 ./emcgrab/
1525 ./emcgrab_HP-UX_v3.4_1.tar
59 ./fileset-state.doc
107 ./fileset.doc
17 ./jaf.etp
4 ./nportids
6 ./p143027b.src
71 ./passwd
1 ./payroll-users.csv
370 ./scripts/
35030 ./spancustom.tar
4170 ./spo740c.tar
1 ./stuff.txt
22 ./superb-users.csv
1 ./supero-users.csv
3 ./tmp/
1 ./wp-testing.txt
157 ./wp/

desired output...

[root@melhpux3] /home/beala01-> ls
.Xauthority RPGC.prn
.cshrc agent.config
.jpiu benstat-dc.pri

etc...

If there is some way to do this in awk, i would appreciate your help.

Thanks in advance :)

[Elmar P. Kolkman · Accepted solution]

The solution should be something like this:

ls | awk '{printf "%s",$0 ; if (NR % 6) {printf "\t";} else {printf "\n"}} END {printf "\n"}'

Or, if you want it better looking, but only if your columns are not too wide:
ls | awk '{ printf "%-15s",$0 ; if ((NR % 6) == 0) { printf "\n";}} END {printf "\n"}'

You can alter the columnwidth in the printf here, and the number of columns is the 6, used with the modulo sign (%).

(Of course it can be shorter, for instance replace printf "\n" with print ""..)

[Muthukumar_5]

ls will try to display the informations in the current directory and du will try do everything under the current directory.

To get at more behaviour of ls with du then,

du -a | awk '{ print $2 }' | sed -e 's/^\.\///;s/\/[^ ]*$//' | sort -u

ls will display file as,

1 3 5 7
2 4 6 8

the order may be changed depends up on the files count there.

[Hoefnix]

Hi,

cat in.txt | awk -F / 'BEGIN {cnt=0} {cnt+=1; if (cnt < 6) {printf "%s ",$2;} else {cnt=0; printf "%s\n",$2;}} END {printf "\n"}'

HTH,
Peter

[Andrew Beal]

Thankyou all,

Elmar & Peter, both your commands worked perfectly, and gave the exact output I required!!!

OMG... you have no idea how much pain you guys have saved me!

Muthukumar, I couldn't get your's to work imediatley, but I will fiddle with it a bit.

Thankyou all once again :)

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Why not use pr?

# whatever_command | pr -t -a -w78

-t: terminal output
-a: accross
-w78: output width

Many more options supported

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn [ who uses the right function for the job ]

[Muthukumar_5]

I misunderstand that " you want to make du output as like ls output" so why tried with sed + awk there.

I hope you got the awk with king's reply there. But procura's command more good as,

ls | pr -d -c 6

it will give easily.

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

Sorry to disagree, but pr doesn't do what you want. In Procura's solution it does not generate 6 columns, and in Muthukumar it will truncate long file names...

Look at this as explanation:
ptc27b08:/var/adm/syslog # ls | pr -t -d -c 6
OLDsyslog.l mail.log.2. mail.log.6. syslog.log syslog.log. syslog.log.

genlog.log mail.log.3. mail.log.7. syslog.log. syslog.log. syslog.log.

mail.log mail.log.4. mail.log.8. syslog.log. syslog.log. syslog.logS

mail.log.1. mail.log.5. mail.log.9. syslog.log. syslog.log.
ptc27b08:/var/adm/syslog # ls
OLDsyslog.log mail.log.1.gz mail.log.4.gz mail.log.7.gz syslog.log syslog.log.3.gz syslog.log.6.gz syslog.log.9.gz
genlog.log mail.log.2.gz mail.log.5.gz mail.log.8.gz syslog.log.1.gz syslog.log.4.gz syslog.log.7.gz syslog.logSAMTRM
mail.log mail.log.3.gz mail.log.6.gz mail.log.9.gz syslog.log.2.gz syslog.log.5.gz syslog.log.8.gz
ptc27b08:/var/adm/syslog #

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

man tr

I did not give a -# (like -2) argument, because the original statement is not clear enough to me. Neither is the general definition of columned output of ls. There is no `rule' on how many columns ls produces. It depends on -F, using colors, screen width, screen properties (man terminfo look at xmc-cookie-glitch) and many other factors.

if the output of command 'blah' gives you three columns, and you want to make 6 columns where only the last field of each line is reformatted, do

# blah | pr -2 -a -t

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

[Elmar P. Kolkman]

But that still does not what you want... If you have long column entries, it still truncates to make 6 columns of equal width. So pr is only usable if you als give a commandline option to set the width to 6 times the lenght of the largest entry plus six, or in formula:
6*(width + 1)