Shell Programming and Scripting

Dear Friends,

I have my command output which displays on one row and values are now scrollable (vertical) 3 pages. How do i display those output in three column so that i no need to scroll?

Example:
dcadd$cat components

1.Caluculator
2.Diary
...
...
50.Mobile
51.Battery
..
...
....
100.Signal
101.Headphone


Want to display as follows

1. Caluculator 50.Mobile 100.Signal
2. Diary 51.Battery 101.Headphone
... .... ....
... .... ....
49.Message 99.MMS 149.Games

Basically converting row ouotput in to column output which produced by echo command.

Thanks
Bala

don't you have the 'column' utility ?
try 'man column'

Sorry. i don't have.

Is there anything to do with echo?

There's something wrong with the logic.

You're combining the lines 1,50 and 100, 2,51 and 101 and so forth.

The output contains 49 lines and the last line is a combination of line 49, 98 and 148.

That means that line 99 is missing in the output, check the scheme below:

Something like this (not sure for the indexing)

Code:

# create an aray with the data
while read L
do   
    T[$i]="$L"
    ((i++))
done < components
# display the array
COLS=3
ROWS=$((${#T[@]}/$COLS))
for ((i=0; i<$ROWS; i++))
do
    for ((j=0; i=<$COLS; j++))
    do
        echo -e "\t$i : t${T[$((i+ROWS*j))]}
    done
    echo
done

I'm sure awk could do the job fine...

Dear friends,,

Basically my output will be 1 to 150 lines. at a time i can see 50 lines then i should scroll another page to view 51-100 etc.

This i want to view in one page which is

1-50 first column
51-100 second column
100-150 third colum.

It is not necessary to split exactly as about. For the given output need to devide in to three column.

Thanks
Bala

Assuming you want to combine line 1 with 51 and 101, line 2 with 52 and 102 and so forth:

Code:

awk '{a[NR%50]=a[NR%50]?a[NR%50] FS $0: $0}
END{for(i=1;i<50;i++){print a[i]};print a[0]}
' components