adjusting string var to fixed length

[Conor P. Cahill]

rchattam at isis.cs.du.edu (King Chattam) writes:

>  Could someone please tell me how blanks can be appended to string vars
>to make it fixed length?

The following will do what you want:

	a=abc
	t="`expr \"$a          \" : \"\(..........\)\"`"

	echo "x${t}x"

You will get:  "xabc       x" which is $a plus 7 blanks.  The x's are only 
used to mark the string so you can see that the blanks actually are there.

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Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.
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