Determine the number of columns the input contains and create a table. This mode is enabled by option *-t, --table* and columns formatting is possible to modify by *--table-** options. Use this mode if not sure.
Input is taken from _file_, or otherwise from standard input. Empty lines are ignored and all invalid multibyte sequences are encoded by x<hex> convention.
== OPTIONS
The argument _columns_ for *--table-** options is a comma separated list of the column names as defined by *--table-columns* or it's column number in order as specified by input. It's possible to mix names and numbers.
Output is formatted to a width specified as number of characters. The original name of this option is *--columns*; this name is deprecated since v2.30. Note that input longer than _width_ is not truncated by default.
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 *--output-separator* option. Table output is useful for pretty-printing.
Specify maximal number of the input columns. The last column will contain all remaining line data if the limit is smaller than the number of the columns in the input data.
Specify columns where is possible to ignore unusually long (longer than average) cells when calculate column width. The option has impact to the width calculation and table formatting, but the printed text is not affected.
+
The option is used for the last visible column by default.
Preserve whitespace-only lines in the input. The default is ignore empty lines at all. This option's original name was *--table-empty-lines* but is now deprecated because it gives the false impression that the option only applies to table mode.
The environment variable *COLUMNS* is used to determine the size of the screen if no other information is available.
== HISTORY
The column command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno.
== BUGS
Version 2.23 changed the *-s* option to be non-greedy, for example:
....
printf "a:b:c\n1::3\n" | column -t -s ':'
....
Old output:
....
a b c
1 3
....
New output (since util-linux 2.23):
....
a b c
1 3
....
Historical versions of this tool indicated that "rows are filled before columns" by default, and that the *-x* option reverses this. This wording did not reflect the actual behavior, and it has since been corrected (see above). Other implementations of *column* may continue to use the older documentation, but the behavior should be identical in any case.
== EXAMPLES
Print fstab with header line and align number to the right:
....
sed 's/#.*//' /etc/fstab | column --table --table-columns SOURCE,TARGET,TYPE,OPTIONS,PASS,FREQ --table-right PASS,FREQ
....
Print fstab and hide unnamed columns:
....
sed 's/#.*//' /etc/fstab | column --table --table-columns SOURCE,TARGET,TYPE --table-hide -