Column

column forms a set of columns from the lines in its input. By default the result has as many full rows as possible. Empty lines are ignored by default (but see Options.)

Options

 * -c specify the number of columns
 * -s specify a set of characters to use with -t
 * -t determine the number of columns in the input delimited by the argument to -s (whitespace by default).
 * -x Have as many full columns as possible.
 * -n Do not merge adjacent delimiters
 * -e Do not ignore empty lines.

Environment
The command is affected by environment variables COLUMNS, LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE as described in the man page for environ(7).

Example
An example of pretty-printing from the man page: (printf "PERM LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY HH:MM/YEAR NAME\n" ; \   ls -l | sed 1d) | column -t

Provided by
Most (all?) Linux distributions incorporate this from the [util-linux] project