printf "%${spacer}s" "" ?

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@gmail.com>


On Mon, May 6, 2024 at 18:04 Ray Andrews <rayandrews@eastlink.ca> wrote:

> So I want to adjust the length of string1. I do this  by inserting a
> spacer in string1 who's length is calculated from the length of string2:
>
>     local diff spacer
>     (( diff = $#string2 - 76 ))
>     for (( dd=1; dd<diff; dd++ )); do spacer+=' '; done
>     ... # spacer will be incorporated into string1, not shown.
>
> It works fine, but I'll bet there's a less laborious way -- some way of
> creating 'spacer' with  'diff' number of spaces without the for loop.  I
> could make 'spacer' too long and then cut it at an index [diff], but I
> doubt that's as simple as it could be.  I know it's there, I just can't
> quite remember.
>
>
>