right text align - bash

Question

I have one problem. My text should be aligned by right in specified width. I have managed to cut output to the desired size, but i have problem with putting everything on right side

Here is what i got:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

length=$1
file=$2
echo $1

echo -e "length = $length \t  file = $file "
f=`fold -w$length $file > output`
while read line
do
        echo "line is $line"
done < "output"

thanks

Answer 1

Try:

printf "%40.40s\n" "$line"

This will make it right-aligned with width 40. If you want no truncation, drop .40 (thanks Dennis:):

printf "%40s\n" "$line"

For example:

printf "%5.5s\n" abc
printf "%5.5s\n" abcdefghij
printf "%5s\n" abc
printf "%5s\n" abcdefghij

will print:

  abc
abcde
  abc
abcdefghij

Answer 2

Your final step could be

sed -e :a -e 's/^.\{1,$length\}$/ &/;ta'

Answer 3

This is a very old question (2010) but it's the top google result, so might as well. Of the existing answers here, one is a guess that doesn't adjust for terminal width, and the other one invokes sed which is unnecessarily costly.

The printf solution is better as it's a bash builtin, so it vwon't slow things down, but instead of guessing - bash gives you $COLUMNS to tell you how wide the terminal window you're dealing with is.

so while you can explicitly align to, say the 40th column:

printf "%40s\n" "$the_weather"

You can size it for whatever your terminal width is with:

printf "%$COLUMNSs\n" "$the_weather"

(since we're mixing up syntax here, we have used the full form syntax for a bash variable ie ${COLUMNS} instead of $COLUMNS, so that bash can identify the variable from the other syntax

In action.. now that we've freed up all that sed processing time, we can use it for something else maybe:

the_weather="$(curl -sm2 'http://wttr.in/Dublin?format=%l:+%c+%f')"
printf "%${COLUMNS}s\n" "${the_weather:-I hope the weather is nice}"