Hey hows it going.. I am new to Unix and working on a Solaris system. I need to take the etc/passwd file and seperate each line by the colons and then space it out evenly so all the lines form colums, so it looks something like this..

Before Example:

Donhoke:x:4454:44on Hooke:/var/adm:


After Example:

Donhoke 4454 44 Don Hooke /var/adm
dfkfgfg 1138 512 Donh fgfghhj bin/ksh


The user names start in column 0.
The user ids end in column 24.
The group ids end in column 34
The real names start in column 40
The shell starts in column 64

Please give me some help or advice.. Thanks!!

awk -F":" '{printf("%-10s%-10s%-10s%-10s\n",$1,$3,$4,$5)}' /etc/passwd

Where '10' is the length of each individual column (I couldn't work out what widths you really wanted!)

Hi ffresh12.

do you need this ?

> /etc/passwd.NEW
cat /etc/passwd | awk ' BEGIN { FS=":"; OFS=":"}
{
print $0 >> "/etc/passwd.NEW"
print "User ",$1 >> "/etc/passwd.NEW"
print "User-ID ",$2 >> "/etc/passwd.NEW"
print "Group-ID ",$3 >> "/etc/passwd.NEW"
print "User Name ",$4 >> "/etc/passwd.NEW"
print "User Shell ",$5 >> "/etc/passwd.NEW"
}'

FS means the field seperator for input in awk
OFS means the output field seperator ( the default in awk is a BLANK )

That is what you get in /etc/passwd.NEW

Donhoke:4454:44on Hooke:/var/adm
User Donhoke
User-ID 4454
Group-ID 44
User Name Don Hooke
User Shell /var/adm


Greetings from Germany
Peter F.