printf - right alignment.

[NiGhtMarEs0nWax]

how do i right align the output of the printf function from a bash script?


printf "%$[COLUMNS-4]s" "string"


for some reason, $COLUMNS has a null value when run from a bash script. is there a way to fetch the width of the current shell session?

ty.

[lomcevak]

This seems to work in a script:

_col=$(stty -a | grep columns | awk '{print $7}' | sed 's/;//')

[NiGhtMarEs0nWax]

yeah it does. thanks.


just one little problem when executing inside a function, for some reason i need to specify the full path for grep. ie /bin/grep. it works fine otherwise in a functionless script.


like so:

_col=$(stty -a | /bin/grep columns | awk '{print $7}' | sed 's/;//')


is there a particular reason for that?

[NiGhtMarEs0nWax]

bump



i like ice cream.

[lomcevak]

Never heard of that. I tried it in a function and it works for me. What flavor of Linux are you using? I'm using CentOS.

My function looks like this:

testit () {
echo "testit"
_col=$(stty -a | grep columns | awk '{print $7}' | sed 's/;//')
echo $_col
}

Post your function please.

[NiGhtMarEs0nWax]

i am using arch.



it is a function in my bashrc for confirming that mounting a volume was successful.
$1 is a string, $2 is an exit code.

function confirmation() {
	cols=$(stty -a | /bin/grep columns | awk '{print $7}' | sed 's/;//') 

	strleng=`echo ${#1}`


	if [ $2 == 0 ]; then
		printf "\033[36m%s \033[1m\033[37m%s \033[32m%$[cols-$strleng-5]s" ":: " "$1" "[DONE]"
	else
		printf "\033[36m%s \033[1m\033[37m%s \033[31m%$[cols-$strleng-5]s" ":: " "$1" "[FAIL]"
	fi

}

[lomcevak]

Oh, the code is in the standard personal initialization file .bashrc. I assume that during login /bin hasn't been appended to the string defined in PATH at that time for some reason

Why I don't know. I don't know how bash executes code, especially during login, and I never have used arch. So I can't help any further. You'll just have to leave it as /bin/grep.

Sorry.

[NiGhtMarEs0nWax]

yeah it's no problem tbh, but bin is specified in PATH. i have echoed it from inside bashrc.

both awk and sed are located in bin too, which makes this problem slightly more unusual.