NAME

       column — columnate lists

SYNOPSIS

       column [-entx] [-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 unless the -e
       option is used.

       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.

       -e      Do not ignore empty lines.

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\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.

BUGS

       Input lines are limited to 512 times LINE_MAX (1M) wide characters in length.

Debian                                            July 29, 2004                                        COLUMN(1)