Printing values in special format using printf

Question

I need to print the following values with printf as the follwoing around like this:

printf "[`date +%d"/"%b"/"%G"-"%T`] [WARN] $PARAM1 $PARAM2 $PARAM3

The required output:

[02/Jun/2010-11:08:42] [WARN]  val1....val2...val3

the gap between val1 to val2 and from val2 to val3 must be const gap not depend the length of the values

Answer 1

printf "%s [WARN] %s %s %s\n" `date +"%d/%b/%G-%T"` foo bar baz

Not sure what you meant by constant gap. If it is a column width for foo, bar and baz, try %13s, where 13 is minimum column width.

Answer 2

I understand your question. Using another answer as a base for mine:

If you want to pad each of the PARAMs then just add a numerical argument to the printf and it will pad it out to that number of characters per field.

Pad by 20 characters: printf "%s [WARN] %20s %20s %20s" date +"%d/%b/%G-%T" foo bar baz

Examples:

printf "%s [WARN] %16s %16s %16s" [`date +"%d/%b/%G-%T"`] foo bar baz

02/Jun/2010-11:22:54 [WARN]              foo              bar              baz

Longer...

printf "%s [WARN] %16s %16s %16s" [`date +"%d/%b/%G-%T"`] longerfoo longerbar longerbaz

02/Jun/2010-11:23:42 [WARN]        longerfoo        longerbar        longerbaz

Much Longer...

printf "%s [WARN] %16s %16s %16s" [`date +"%d/%b/%G-%T"`] muchlongerfoo muchlongerbar muchlongerbaz

02/Jun/2010-11:24:12 [WARN]    muchlongerfoo    muchlongerbar    muchlongerbaz

Try it on a console. It works.