Pretty print tabular data
From raju
Consider the following data
% cat data3.txt clue answer Cotillion honorees debs Contend vie Conductor Maestro
where the columns are separated by a tab character. However, since the field length in each column changes across, it looks really messy if the file is just catted out. A better way to print it is to use the "column" command from the bsdmainutils package.
% cat data3.txt | column -ts $'\t' clue answer Cotillion honorees debs Contend vie Conductor Maestro
Tested this on a machine running a combination of Debian Wheezy (oldstable) and Squeeze (stable) using
% zsh --version zsh 5.0.7 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) % which column /usr/bin/column % dpkg -S /usr/bin/column bsdmainutils: /usr/bin/column % dpkg -l bsdmainutils | grep ^ii ii bsdmainutils 9.0.6 amd64 collection of more utilities from FreeBSD