column

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 de-
     fault, 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 de-
             limiters 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\n" ; \
           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 512 times LINE_MAX (1M) wide characters in
     length.

BSD                              July 29, 2004                             BSD