adjusting string var to fixed length

[John R. MacMillan]

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

If the fixed length is relatively short, something like the following
in sh/ksh will do:

var=foo
# Pad to 10:   10 spaces        10 dots
var=`expr "$var          " : '\(..........\).*'`