We have remained faithful to the print command so far, as we have been limited in what we require from the output. If we want to print out, say, the username, UID, and default shell we need to start formatting the output just a little. In this case, we can organize the output in well-shaped columns. Without formatting, the command we use will look similar to the following example where we use commas to separate the field that we want to print:

$ awk ' BEGIN { FS=":" } { print $1,$3,$7 } ' /etc/passwd

We use the BEGIN block here, as we can make use of it to print column headers later.

To understand the problem a little better, we can take a look at the following screenshot that illustrates the uneven column widths:

The issue that we have in the output is that the columns do not align, as the username is of an inconsistent length. To improve on this, we can use the printf function where we can specify the column width. The syntax for the awk statements will be similar to the...