Programming with awk

Formatted printing

For more carefully formatted output, awk provides a C-like printf statement

   printf format, expr[1], expr[2], . . ., expr[n]

which prints the expr[i]'s according to the specification in the string format. For example, the awk program

   { printf "%10s %6d\n", $1, $3 }

prints the first field (``$1'') as a string of 10 characters (right-justified), then a space, then the third field (``$3'') as a decimal number in a six-character field, then a newline (\n). With input from the file countries, this program prints an aligned table:

         USSR    262
       Canada     24
        China    866
          USA    219
       Brazil    116
    Australia     14
        India    637
    Argentina     26
        Sudan     19
      Algeria     18

With printf, no output separators or newlines are produced automatically; you must create them yourself by using \n in the format specification. ``The printf statement'' contains a full description of printf.