Column

Intro¶

The unix column command line utility columnates lists and csv-style data.

Note that the column utility is not part of the POSIX specification. Among other things, it means different systems will support a different feature set. And as always, GNU command line utilities offer a larger (and arguably better) set of features.

Initial example¶

For example, if the columns are separated with spaces (and tabs are also considered spaces by default):

cat <<EOF | column -t
ID NAME EDITOR
1 Bram vim
2 Richard emacs
3 Vader ed
EOF
ID  NAME     EDITOR
1   Bram     vim
2   Richard  emacs
3   Vader    ed

Or, if the fields are separated with some other character, like “,” (comma), then we use -s, to make column use “,” as the separator:

$ cat <<EOF | column -ts,
ID,NAME,EDITOR
1,Bram,vim
2,Richard,emacs
3,Vader,ed
EOF
ID  NAME     EDITOR
1   Bram     vim
2   Richard  emacs
3   Vader    ed

And if the data is on a file, we can do something like this:

$ column -ts, -- ./heroes.csv 
ID  NAME     EDITOR
1   Bram     vim
2   Richard  emacs
3   Vader    ed