scripting question Help

[Arto V. Viitanen]

>>>>> "Matt" == Matt P <m_prorok@hotmail.com> writes:

Matt> I'm new to UNIX programming, and have been asked to write a script
Matt> that writes the name and number of lines in a file to a new file. The
Matt> part I'm having trouble with is the format; the # of lines has to be
Matt> 12 chars and right- justified. IE ' 238562'. Here's what I have so
Matt> far:

Matt> echo $filename `cat $filename | wc -l` >> $new_file

Matt> Which writes the filename and # of lines. Does anybody have an idea
Matt> of how to do the formating?

If your system has printf(1) command, you could

printf '%s%12d\n' $filename `cat $filename | wc -l` >> $new_file

If not, try awk or something similar

--
Arto V. Viitanen [email]av@cs.uta.fi[/email]
University of Tampere, Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Tampere, Finland [url]http://www.cs.uta.fi/~av/[/url]

[Frank Schmitt]

[email]m_prorok@hotmail.com[/email] (Matt P) writes:

> I'm new to UNIX programming, and have been asked to write a script
> that writes the name and number of lines in a file to a new file. The
> part I'm having trouble with is the format; the # of lines has to be
> 12 chars and right- justified. IE ' 238562'. Here's what I have
> so far:
>
> echo $filename `cat $filename | wc -l` >> $new_file
>
> Which writes the filename and # of lines. Does anybody have an idea
> of how to do the formating?

use printf(), which is available at least in ruby and perl.
ruby example:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

ARGV.each {|file|
len = `wc -l #{file}`
printf("%s %12i\n",file,len.to_i)
}

or, in one line:

ruby -e 'ARGV.each {|file| len = `wc -l #{file}`; printf("%s %12i\n",file,len.to_i)}'

For description of the printf() format specifiers, see man printf


HTH & kind regards
frank

--
Frank Schmitt
4SC AG phone: +49 89 700763-0
e-mail: frank DOT schmitt AT 4sc DOT com