table of contents
COLUMN(1) | 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\n" ; \
ls -l | sed 1d) | column
-t
SEE ALSO¶
HISTORY¶
The column
command appeared in
4.3BSD-Reno.
BUGS¶
Input lines are limited to 512 times
LINE_MAX
(1M) wide characters in length.
July 29, 2004 | Debian |