Table of Contents

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\n” \ ; 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.

Table of Contents