How to align columns with awk

Question

I tried to execute below command:

ls -ltr | awk \'BEGIN { print \"File\\t\\t\\tOwner\"} { print $9,\"\\t\",$3} END {print \"-DONE \\n\"}\'

and

Answer 1

You need to use padding except for the last column. Since you have only 2 columns, the first will be enough.

When you use printf instead of print, you can print all the variables based on a template. The following examples print a string (%s) with a padding (24) on the right side (-24), so it becomes %-24s.

ls -ltr | awk 'BEGIN {printf "%-24s%s","File","Owner"} { printf "%-24s%s\n",$9,$3} END {print "-DONE \n"}'

For more information you can check this or this.