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\n" ; \
ls -l | sed 1d) | column
-t
HISTORY¶
The column command appeared in
4.3BSD-Reno.
BUGS¶
Input lines are limited to 512 times LINE_MAX (1M) wide
characters in length.
