COLUMN(1) BSD General Commands Manual COLUMN(1) NAME column -- columnate lists SYNOPSIS column [-ntx] [-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. -n By default, the column command will merge multiple adjacent delimiters into a single delimiter when using the -t option; this option disables that behavior. This option is a Debian GNU/Linux extension. 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