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Portable way to print list in columns

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Portable way to print list in columns
# 1  
Old 07-31-2016
Portable way to print list in columns
so if i have a list of file names, on linux system, we can use the column command to split them up into columns.

sadly, the "columns" command does not exist on some OSes.

so i found that the pr command can also work.

but, pr tends to truncate the names. There's a way around that on Linux. You can pass a "-J" option to pr. but, this needs to work on other OSes where the pr command does not have that option.

so i'm wondering, is there another way to print a list into a specific number of columns?

desired output should be:

Code:
$ ls | egrep ecount | pr -l 1 -t -3                    
ecount.0                ecount.1                ecount.10
ecount.11               ecount.12               ecount.2
ecount.3                ecount.4                ecount.5
ecount.6                ecount.7                ecount.8
ecount.9                ecountall.0             ecountall.1
ecountall.10            ecountall.11            ecountall.12
ecountall.2             ecountall.3             ecountall.4
ecountall.5             ecountall.6             ecountall.7
ecountall.8             ecountall.9
$ 
$

# 2  
Old 07-31-2016
How about
Code:
ls -1 | paste -s -d'\t\t\n'

?
This User Gave Thanks to RudiC For This Post:
SkySmart
# 3  
Old 07-31-2016
Quote:
Originally Posted by RudiC
How about
Code:
ls -1 | paste -s -d'\t\t\n'

?
this doesn't work on AIX:

Code:
$ 
$ ls | egrep ecount | paste -s -d'\t\t\n'
Usage: paste [-s] [-d List] file...
$ 
$

# 4  
Old 07-31-2016
Try giving the delimiters verbatim, i.e. a <TAB> char instead of \t.
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