Pre-pending to the begining of a line 1

[JasonParr]

I have been attempting to pad the beginning of a line with zeros. the first field in a line is a number with the length of 1 - 6. I would like to put zeros in as place holders so that feild looks as though it is right justified and has a set width of 6 characters in length. The file is variable length and can get quite large and I need to be able to do this to all the lines. My AWK is very rusty any help is much appreciated. Thank you in advance.
-Jason

 

[CaKiwi]

Hi Jason,

This should do what you want.

{
if (length($1) < 6) {
print length($1)
$0 = substr(&quot;000000&quot;,1,6-length($1)) $0
}
print
}

Hope this helps.
CaKiwi

 

[CaKiwi]

Hi Jason,

Sorry, I inadvertently left a debug print statement in my last post. It should be

{
if (length($1) < 6) {
$0 = substr(&quot;000000&quot;,1,6-length($1)) $0
}
print
}

Hope this helps. CaKiwi