How to get separate with space or tab in the awk example

Question

while I'm playing with awk I came to execute like

ls -la >> a.txt ; awk {'print $5  $1'} a.txt ;

then its giving output like

53277-rw-------
52347-rw-------

how can I get space between those two friends of output .

As an advice, you should not parse the output of ls. This will bite you in the back sooner or later.
In awk, to concatenate two strings, you just place them side-by-side -- print $5 $1

devav2 · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-23 11:01:44Z

up vote 6 down vote accepted

Just change the line to

ls -la >> a.txt ; awk {'print $5 "        " $1'} a.txt ;

this should print the output with spaces.

Hope this helps.

Edit:

As suggested by McNisse you can use printf, which would provide you good output format

ls -la >> a.txt ; awk {'printf ("%5s\t%s\n", $5, $1)'} a.txt ;

edited Dec 23 '12 at 11:01

answered Dec 23 '12 at 9:35

devav2
7,02041643

1

The printf function provides better control, specially if you want to format numbers. printf("%s\t%s\n", $5, $1) – McNisse Dec 23 '12 at 10:11

glenn jackman · Answer 2 · 2012-12-23 12:33:24Z

up vote 4 down vote

Another awk-specific technique, use the "output field separator"

ls -la | awk -v OFS='\t' '{print $5, $1}'

The comma is crucial here.

answered Dec 23 '12 at 12:33

glenn jackman
1,15026

thanks for the answer , its also working . – Jai Dec 23 '12 at 13:06

2 Answers