How do I print some text in bash and pad it with spaces to a certain width?

Question

I\'m echoing some text in a bash script with a variable in it, and want to pad that variable so it will always have the appropriate ammount of spaces to the right to keep th

Answer 1

Collect all your lines in one var or text file then pipe it through column command. So this (my example file /tmp/columns.txt)

Echoing random number 1080 [ OK ]
Echoing random number 44332356 [ OK ]
Echoing random number 34842 [ OK ]
Echoing random number 342 [ OK ]

became this

Echoing  random  number  1080      [  OK  ]
Echoing  random  number  44332356  [  OK  ]
Echoing  random  number  34842     [  OK  ]
Echoing  random  number  342       [  OK  ]

Example command: cat /tmp/columns.txt | column -t