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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Removing blank columns from a file Post 302226318 by sumirmehta on Monday 18th of August 2008 05:15:52 PM
Old 08-18-2008
there are certain variations to the file mentioned above

1. the width of a column is fixed (say 10) but that includes the numbers and padded spaces, so it could be "1234 " and "123456 "

2. there are other columns as well (3 shown here for simplicity), and any of the columns in between could be blank.

The real problem here is that as there are spaces in the columns which have values (padded spaces) as well as there are columns which are totally blank, it is difficult to identify the diff between them..
 

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COLUMN(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						 COLUMN(1)

NAME
column -- columnate lists SYNOPSIS
column [-tx] [-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. 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. column exits 0 on success, >0 if an error occurred. ENVIRONMENT
COLUMNS The environment variable COLUMNS is used to determine the size of the screen if no other information is available. EXAMPLES
(echo "PERM LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY 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. BSD
March 9, 2008 BSD
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