How can I align the columns of tables in Bash?

Question

I\'d like to output a table format text. What I tried to do was echo the elements of an array with \'\\t\', but it was misaligned.

My code

for((i=0;i         


        

Answer 1

printf is great, but people forget about it.

$ for num in 1 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1000000; do printf "%10s %s\n" $num "foobar"; done
         1 foobar
        10 foobar
       100 foobar
      1000 foobar
     10000 foobar
    100000 foobar
   1000000 foobar

$ for((i=0;i

Notice I used %10s for strings. %s is the important part. It tells it to use a string. The 10 in the middle says how many columns it is to be. %d is for numerics (digits).

man 1 printf for more info.