AWK: Is there a way to limit the width of an output field?

Question

I need to limit the final size of a field to 2048. I could probably use:

ACTION_PARAMETER=substr($2,1,2048);

But is there a better way?

Answer 1

You could use printf

printf "%.2048s\n", $2

Answer 2

Alternate way:

printf "%.2048s", $2

Answer 3

You can play with the field separator FS being "" and then limiting the number of fields NF:

awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=""} NF=2048' file

Example with 3 instead of 2048

$ cat a
hello
how are
you
i am ok

$ awk 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=""} NF=3' a
hel
how
you
i a

or even as a parameter:

$ awk -v limit=2 'BEGIN{FS=OFS=""} NF=limit' a
he
ho
yo
i 

Answer 4

How about native bash parameter slicing

printf "%s" ${2:0:2048}