Alignment when printing a series of records

Question

How can I resolve the problem of the tables going to the right. I just want it to be shown under 1.

Here's my script with START added. The alignment has gone wonky now:

while IFS="," read f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 f6 f7 f8 f9 f10 f11 f12
do
 printf "START %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %5s" $f1 $f2 $f3 $f4 $f5 $f6 $f7 $f8 $f9 $f10 $f11 $f12; # ifet the student id
done < records.csv
echo " Press <enter> to return to main menu"
read null

Answer 1

You need to add a newline at the end of the printf statement, like so:

             printf "START %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %10s %5s\n" $f1 $f2 $f3 $f4 $f5 $f6 $f7 $f8 $f9 $f10 $f11 $f12; # ifet the student id

(note the \n)

Answer 2

That is probably because, you give only 5 positions for 4th field, but it may have six characters like HARRY1 in your example:

printf "%10s %10s %10s %5s <...>
                       ^^^ 

However, there is nice prettifier in GNU/Linux column which automatically selects column width depending on incoming data:

$ cat test.csv
Harry,2
Ed,3
Mary,4
Looooooooongname,8

$ sed 's/,/ /' test.csv | column -t
Harry             2
Ed                3
Mary              4
Looooooooongname  8

$ sed 's/,/ /' test.csv | grep -v Looooooooongname | column -t
Harry  2
Ed     3
Mary   4

May be it is better choice for you?