column(1) [debian man page]
COLUMN(1) BSD General Commands Manual COLUMN(1) NAME
column -- columnate lists SYNOPSIS
column [-entx] [-c columns] [-s sep] [file ...] DESCRIPTION
The column utility formats its input into multiple columns. Rows are filled before columns. Input is taken from file operands, or, by default, from the standard input. Empty lines are ignored unless the -e option is used. The options are as follows: -c Output is formatted for a display columns wide. -s Specify a set of characters to be used to delimit columns for the -t option. -t 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 -s option. Useful for pretty-printing displays. -x Fill columns before filling rows. -n By default, the column command will merge multiple adjacent delimiters into a single delimiter when using the -t option; this option disables that behavior. This option is a Debian GNU/Linux extension. -e Do not ignore empty lines. ENVIRONMENT
The COLUMNS, LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of column as described in environ(7). EXIT STATUS
The column utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. EXAMPLES
(printf "PERM LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY " ; printf "HH:MM/YEAR NAME " ; ls -l | sed 1d) | column -t SEE ALSO
colrm(1), ls(1), paste(1), sort(1) HISTORY
The column command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno. BUGS
Input lines are limited to LINE_MAX (2048) bytes in length. BSD
July 29, 2004 BSD
Check Out this Related Man Page
PSC(1) General Commands Manual PSC(1) NAME
psc - prepare sc files SYNOPSIS
psc [-fLkrSPv] [-s cell] [-R n] [-C n] [-n n] [-d c] DESCRIPTION
Psc is used to prepare data for input to the spreadsheet calculator sc(1). It accepts normal ascii data on standard input. Standard out- put is a sc file. With no options, psc starts the spreadsheet in cell A0. Strings are right justified. All data on a line is entered on the same row; new input lines cause the output row number to increment by one. The default delimiters are tab and space. The column for- mats are set to one larger than the number of columns required to hold the largest value in the column. OPTIONS
-f Omit column width calculations. This option is for preparing data to be merged with an existing spreadsheet. If the option is not specified, the column widths calculated for the data read by psc will override those already set in the existing spreadsheet. -L Left justify strings. -k Keep all delimiters. This option causes the output cell to change on each new delimiter encountered in the input stream. The default action is to condense multiple delimiters to one, so that the cell only changes once per input data item. -r Output the data by row first then column. For input consisting of a single column, this option will result in output of one row with multiple columns instead of a single column spreadsheet. -s cell Start the top left corner of the spreadsheet in cell. For example, -s B33 will arrange the output data so that the spreadsheet starts in column B, row 33. -R n Increment by n on each new output row. -C n Increment by n on each new output column. -n n Output n rows before advancing to the next column. This option is used when the input is arranged in a single column and the spreadsheet is to have multiple columns, each of which is to be length n. -d c Use the single character c as the delimiter between input fields. -P Plain numbers only. A field is a number only when there is no imbedded [-+eE]. -S All numbers are strings. -v Print the version of psc SEE ALSO
sc(1) AUTHOR
Robert Bond PSC 7.16 19 September 2002 PSC(1)