Linux Awk help on code - linux

Question

I need to print the contents of a file, and give a title to each column, leaving enough space to be readable, and then I need to output this into a new file. I followed this tutorial for a good while but I've gotten stuck.
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/01/awk-introduction-tutorial-7-awk-print-examples
This is the example code they use, which would give me exactly what I need to do with mine. But it will not work when I adjust it.
$ awk 'BEGIN {print "Name\tDesignation\tDepartment\tSalary";}
{print $2,"\t",$3,"\t",$4,"\t",$NF;}
END{print "Report Generated\n--------------";
}' employee.txt
This is mine, as unlike the example, I want the whole document printed and don't really want this "report generated" nonsense under it. I tried adding {print;}' to the end after end, and made sure to start a new line and... nothing.
$ awk 'BEGIN {Print "Firstname\tLastname\tPoints";} END > awktest.txt > done
Where have I gone wrong? It keeps giving me the response Source line 2.

Answer 1

To remove the footline, just drop out anything starting from END till the closing ':
awk 'BEGIN {print "Name\tDesignation\tDepartment\tSalary";} {print $2,"\t",$3,"\t",$4,"\t",$NF;}' employee.txt
In your second example, you left out the closing ', and I suspect you put one more ">" than needed:
awk 'BEGIN {print "Firstname\tLastname\tPoints";}' awktest.txt > done
The latter example will however silently ignore everything read from "awktest.txt".

Answer 2

It looks like what you need is just to insert a header line, which can easily be done with sed (as well as awk) or with cat
$ sed '1iFirstname\tLastname\tPoints' file > output.file
or
$ awk 'BEGIN{print "Firstname\tLastname\tPoints"} 1' file > output.file
or
$ cat <(echo -e "Firstname\tLastname\tPoints") file > output.file

Answer 3

It seems you have missed out the actual printing of the columns and a source file, also I read that you don't need any END actions...
awk 'BEGIN {Print "Firstname\tLastname\tPoints";} END > awktest.txt > done`
Should be...
awk 'BEGIN {Print "Firstname\tLastname\tPoints";}{print $1,"\t",$2,"\t",$3;}' source_file.txt > awktest.txt`
Just remember to change the $1,$2,$3 to what columns on the source file you need.
FYI. I'm no expert, just reading the tuts :)

Answer 4

The awk print function is named print, not Print. idk why all the solutions are including ,"\t", in their print statements. You don't want that - you want to set -v OFS='\t' at the start of the script and then just use , between fields. All you want is:
awk -v OFS='\t' '
BEGIN {print "Name", "Designation", "Department", "Salary"}
{print $2, $3, $4, $NF}
}' employee.txt
assuming those are the correct field numbers you want to print from your data. Sample input/output in your question would be extremely useful to help us answer it.