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¶
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.