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
In Vim, I would use the following command:
:%s/$/\=repeat(' ',64-virtcol('$'))
(The use of the virtcol()
function, as opposed to the col()
one,
is guided by the necessity to properly handle tab characters as well
as multibyte non-ASCII characters that might occur in the text.)
$ awk '{printf "%-63s\n", $0}' testfile > newfile