freebsd 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.

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
" ; 
	   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.

BSD
								   July 29, 2004							       BSD