suse man page for column

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
	   (printf "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.

AVAILABILITY
     The column command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.

BSD
								   June 6, 1993 							       BSD