Help with Awk and Printf, please!
 

Hi guys. I need help with getting a file to give me a certain output using the awk command, please.

I have this file that has the following format:

SalesID:LastName:FirstName:MI

I need an output that is going to be like this:

LastName, FirstName MI SalesID

NOTE: all 3 names have to fit into a 25 character container and the SalesID needs to be right alligned. SalesID is a number.

So far, here is what I have.

I have a file called "salespeople" with data in a format I described above.

the command I have so far is:

awk -F: '{printf "%s, %-s %-s %d\n", $2, $3, $4, $1}' salespeople

Please tell me what I'm doing wrong. This is kind of urgent too.

Thanks in advance!

First of all, w/o knowing the lengths of all parts of the line this
is going to be impossible, full stop.
That's 26 characters there and then, w/o padding. No way to fit this
into 25, is there?


That said:

I actually figured this out on my own. But, with a hint from the class instructor. The solution is to pipe an awk into another awk.

awk -F: '{printf "%s, %s %s: %s\n", $2, $3, $4, $1}' salespeople | awk -F: '{printf "%-25.25s %s\n", $1, $2}'

Thanks anyway!

Tell your instructor that's poor resource management, as I've shown above that
it can be done in one statement :P

Hm, you're right :) Though, to make it same I had to take out comma after %-25s. Thanks though! Thanks for taking your time and responding.

By the way, sir, could you explain your code? I'm not getting how you constructed it. The quotes got me all confused.

All I did was to create a format-string w/ two parameters, one for
string data, one for numeric data, and assembled the "string" out of
the name chunks on the fly....

Btw, I didn't have a comma after %-25s ;}

The second red chunk is ONE string, not three, using awk concatenation.

In detail:
So everything that isn't red is just part of the string which glues
the awk fields together.


Cheers,
Tink

I like post #4, made me smile this morning :)

/me takes a bow: "Why thank you, kind Sir!" =o)



Always pleased to have some entertainment value ;D




Cheers,
Tink

I just want to see the instructor's face if the OP has the courage to tell/show him ;)

no way :)

that's deep :)

a bit too deep for me lol

Just submit the efficient answer and see what happens ;)

Here's a good page on printf; as it says, its basically the same as implemented in C (in fact its probably just a front-end for the same lib call :) ) http://linuxconfig.org/bash-printf-s...-with-examples

Good awk guide http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Awk.html

the guy took away points from last assignment for excluding question numbers from the problems on the paper that i submitted. it had all the questions and answers and all were 100% correct. way too picky.

Sigh ... :(
A good course should encourage learning the tool, not just canned qns/answers, otherwise you can only copy/paste, not actually deal with the real world .
Never mind, just keep the good stuff in your back pocket for afterwards :)