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

Another awk, that reads the file once, hashes the records to memory (expected that you have enough memory available) and format and outputs in the end:

$ awk -F\# '{                              # define record separator
    a[NR]=$1                               # store 1st field
    b[NR]=$2                               # store 2nd field
    m=((n=length($1))>m?n:m)               # figure out the max length of 1st field
}
END {                                      # in the end
    for(i=1;i<=NR;i++)                     # iterate stored fields
        printf "%-" m+4 "s%s\n",a[i],b[i]  # output
}' file

Output:

Tomato          Vegetable
Orange          Fruit
Cucumber        Vegetable
Sweat Potato    Fruit