Pad all lines with spaces to a fixed width in Vim or using sed, awk, etc

Question

How can I pad each line of a file to a certain width (say, 63 characters wide), padding with spaces if need be?

For now, let’s assume all lines are guaranteed to be less

Answer 1

With sed, without a loop:

$ sed -i '/.\{63\}/!{s/$/                                                                /;s/^\(.\{63\}\).*/\1/}' file

Be sure to have enough spaces in the 1st substitution to match the number of space you want to add.

Answer 2

It looks like you are comfortable using vim, but here is a pure Bash/simple-sed solution in case you need to do it from the command line (note the 63 spaces in the sed substitution):

$ sed 's/$/                                                               /' yourFile.txt |cut -c 1-63

Answer 3

This might work for you:

$ sed -i ':a;/.\{63\}/!{s/$/ /;ba}' file

or perhaps more efficient but less elegant:

$ sed -i '1{x;:a;/.\{63\}/!{s/^/ /;ba};x};/\(.\{63\}\).*/b;G;s//\1/;y/\n/ /' file

Answer 4

Just for fun, a Perl version:

$ perl -lpe '$_ .= " " x (63 - length $_)'

Answer 5

Another Perl solution:

$ perl -lne 'printf "%-63s\n", $_' file

Answer 6

Vim

:%s/.*/\=printf('%-63s', submatch(0))