unix shellscript: echo question

quarryman

I'm trying to print an amount of time like so;

2H 43M
12H 4M
25H 25M
1H 4M

The problem is i want to have the number of characters in each item the same. So ideally it will look like this:

02H 43M
12H 04M
25H 25M
01H 04M

How do i get the script to fill in the spaces with 0s but not let the time exceed a certain number of characters?

Also when I'm printing echo like so;

echo -e "$high \t $low \t"

it can look like this:

314341 432344
32 432433
32423434 342343
3243 3432434


the tabs don't seem to want to align the text. any ideas?

thanks in advance.

ressem

I'd suggest using printf instead of echo.
http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/printf.1.asp
It has pretty much the same formatting functionality as the c version

E.g.
printf "%09uH %05uM %03uS \n" 2 43 0
Outputs
000000002H 00043M 000S
The 0 following each % indicates that you want 0 padding, and the next number is the width that the field will fill.

%u indicates unsigned integers.

So you'd be using "%02uH %02uM" 2 83

quarryman

thanks ressem that's a great help