I am trying to extract positions 6 and 7 from the following file (These two fields will be merged with another file):

0544,0544,ABC,TW001,AA,9,
0376,0311,ABC,TW001,BA,9,20050409

A majority of the time position 7 will not contain a value. I am having a hard time setting position 7 to spaces when the field does not contain a value. I have tried the following:

grep ${num} aud | awk -F, '{printf "%2s%8.8s", $6, $7}'

but it only pads one space. Does anyone have any suggestions?

since in your example data, the 7th field is undefined, this might work:

awk -F, ' { if($7 == "")
printf "%2s%8.8s\n", $6, " "
else
printf "%2s%8.8s\n", $6, $7 } ' datafile

Actually, your code works as expected for me. Whether field 7 is null or not, my output is 10 characters. For your first example line, I get:

b9bbbbbbbb

where b=space. That's a 2-character right-justified field followed by an 8-character right-justified field.

If you redirect this output to a file, you will see that it has a length of 10 characters (2 + 8) with no line terminator.

Thanks for both of your help. I actually ended up checking if the value was = "" or " " in a loop and using echo to add the spaces. For some reason I stiil was not able to get the field justified with spaces