I'm a newbie to unix scripting and I'm trying to find the most efficient way to concatenate two string variables together but to retain the spaces for output to a fixed width file. (I'm using KSH on a Unix platform) ex: var1="99999 " (5 blanks, left justified) var2="01012004" How can I concat these two vars together and store the value into a var named 'string', w/o losing my spaces? I tried using awk, but maybe my syntax is wrong: string=$(awk '{printf("%-10s%-8s\n",$var1,$var2);}') echo "$string" I keep getting this error: awk: Field $() is not correct.

It is just a simple concatenation (string=$var1$var2). But when you echo $string, enclose in double-quotes - otherwise, echo will echo each word separated by a single space. var1="99999     "  # (5 trailing spaces) var2="01012004" string=$var1$var2 echo $string 99999 01012004 echo "$string" 99999     01012004 And awk cannot see environment variables by default, although there are several ways for awk to get at them.  Below, I just pipe them in: string=$(echo $var1 $var2 | awk '{printf("%-10s%-8s\n",$1, $2);}') echo "$string" 99999     01012004

Thanks for explaining that bit about awk and environment variables. Both of your examples did the trick.