COLUMN(1) User Commands COLUMN(1)NAMEcolumn - columnate lists
SYNOPSIScolumn [options] [file...]
DESCRIPTION
The column utility formats its input into multiple columns. By
default, rows are filled before columns. Input is taken from file, or
otherwise from standard input. Empty lines are ignored.
OPTIONS-c, --columns width
Output is formatted to a width specified as number of charac‐
ters.
-t, --table
Determine the number of columns the input contains and create a
table. Columns are delimited with whitespace, by default, or
with the characters supplied using the --output-separator
option. Table output is useful for pretty-printing.
-s, --separator separators
Specify the possible input item delimiters (default is white‐
space).
-o, --output-separator string
Specify the columns delimiter for table output (default is two
spaces).
-x, --fillrows
Fill columns before filling rows.
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
ENVIRONMENT
The environment variable COLUMNS is used to determine the size of the
screen if no other information is available.
EXAMPLES
sed 's/#.*//' /etc/fstab | column-t
BUGS
The util-linux version 2.23 changed -s option to be non-greedy, for
example:
$ printf "a:b:c\n1::3\n" | column-t -s ':'
old output:
a b c
1 3
new output (since util-linux 2.23)
a b c
1 3
SEE ALSOcolrm(1), ls(1), paste(1), sort(1)HISTORY
The column command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno.
AVAILABILITY
The column command is part of the util-linux package and is available
from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
util-linux October 2010 COLUMN(1)