Center Output

Soulful93 · 04-28-2004, 08:25 PM

I'm trying to center the output of

cd /etc
cat passwd

how would I do that?

crabboy · 04-28-2004, 11:13 PM

Not sure why, but...

Code:

#!/bin/sh

IFS='
'
WIDTH=`stty -a | grep columns | cut -d';' -f3 | awk ' { print $2 }'`

typeset -i LENGTH
for i in `cat /etc/passwd`; do
  LENGTH=`echo $i | wc -c`
  DIFF=`expr $WIDTH - $LENGTH`
  SPACE=`expr $DIFF / 2`
  while [ $SPACE -gt 0 ]; do
     echo  -n ' '
     SPACE=`expr $SPACE - 1`
  done
  echo $i
done

rkef · 04-28-2004, 11:19 PM

There are many text formatting programs that would do this sort of thing. It's also fairly simple to write an ugly script (doesn't break on lines greater than the screen width):

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
                                                                                                    
my $screen_width = 100;
                                                                                                    
for my $line (<>) {
        my $line_length = length $line;
        my $whitespace = $screen_width/2 - $line_length / 2;
        print " " while ($whitespace-- > 0);
        print $line;
}

Just pipe in whatever you like. I hardcoded the screen width because, for reasons unbeknownst to me, my script doesn't receive the $COLUMNS environment variable. Season to taste.

(As I was previewing this, I noticed someone else was also bored hahaha! edit: ooh stty ... I'm asleep at the wheel.)

Castelior · 04-29-2004, 02:11 AM

Try this:

cat /etc/passwd|sed -e :a -e 's/^.\{1,77\}$/ & /;ta'

change 77 to modify line length