Shell: how to right justify columns for my file - bash

Question

I have a data file like below:
Jones,Bill,235 S. Williams St.,Denver,CO,80221,[phone]
Smith,Tom,404 Polk Ave.,Los Angeles,CA,90003,[phone]
I want each line be separated by ',' and right justify columns, just like below
Jones Bill 235 S. Williams St. Denver CO 80221 [phone]
Smith Tom 404 Polk Ave. Los Angeles CA 90003 [phone]
This is my code and it doesn't work. Pls help, thx.
while read line
do
echo "$line" | awk -F, '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++)printf "%15s" $i}'
echo
done < "datafile.txt"

Answer 1

You should not pipe each line to awk with a loop. Loops are slow and it decreases readability (have a look at Why is using a shell loop to process text considered bad practice?). Awk reads lines by default, just provide the filename as an argument:
awk -F, '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){printf "%22s",$i};print ""}' datafile.txt
Notice %15s would not be enough to yield a nice table, so I increased it to %22s. And you missed the comma , in printf statement, that is why it your attempt failed.
You could also use column -ts "," datafile.txt, but that would left justify the output.

Answer 2

Awk itself has for loop. Using a shell for loop can work too.
$ cat file
Jones,Bill,235 S. Williams St.,Denver,CO,80221,[phone]
Smith,Tom,404 Polk Ave.,Los Angeles,CA,90003,[phone]
$ awk -F, '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) printf("%20s", $i); printf "\n"; }' file
Jones Bill 235 S. Williams St. Denver CO 80221 [phone]
Smith Tom 404 Polk Ave. Los Angeles CA 90003 [phone]
$
$ while read line; do echo "$line" | awk -F, '{ for (i=1; i<=NF; i++) printf("%20s", $i); printf "\n"; }'; done < file
Jones Bill 235 S. Williams St. Denver CO 80221 [phone]
Smith Tom 404 Polk Ave. Los Angeles CA 90003 [phone]
$

Answer 3

With column and rev:
$ rev file | column -ts, | rev
Jones Bill 235 S. Williams St. Denver CO 80221 [phone]
Smith Tom 404 Polk Ave. Los Angeles CA 90003 [phone]
or with GNU column (for -R) and seq:
$ column -ts, -R $(seq -s, 999) file
Jones Bill 235 S. Williams St. Denver CO 80221 [phone]
Smith Tom 404 Polk Ave. Los Angeles CA 90003 [phone]