If you use print in awk you’ll lose the formatting of the input file — most of the times that may be OK, but not always. The solution is simple — replace print by printf. Here’s an example with strings in the input fields:

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“%…s” means a character string.

20 means a length of 20 characters.

awk defaults to right-alignment (presumably for columns of figures) so you need -20 for left-alignment.

Credit: here.