How to make awk produce columns

Question

I have a file with two columns. Each line in this file has a different size of words

awk \'$5=$9\' FS="#" OFS="\\t" file1**


Tomato#Vegetable         


        

Answer 1

With Unix / Linux you can use column to produce column output:

$ column -t -s '#' your_file
Tomato        Vegetable
Orange        Fruit
Cucumber      Vegetable
Sweat Potato  Fruit

To do it in awk you can read the file twice to get the max field length for each column. Once you do that, you can fix the field width with sprintf with the field width + pad value:

awk -F'#' -v pad=4 '
        FNR==NR {                    # FNR==NR means first file
            for (i=1;i<=NF;i++)      # find the max width of each field
                if(max[i]

Prints:

Tomato        Vegetable  
Orange        Fruit      
Cucumber      Vegetable  
Sweat Potato  Fruit