Updated: 22 October 2026 · Applies to: util-linux column, any Linux distribution
The column command turns delimited text, or any command's output, into neatly aligned columns.
Format a file's contents
Say you have a pipe-delimited file:
cat authors.txt
pos|author|articles|comments 1|writer1|895|8454 2|writer2|785|6785 3|writer3|458|4529
Pipe it through column, with -t to auto-detect the number of columns and -s to set the delimiter:
cat authors.txt | column -t -s "|"
pos author articles comments 1 writer1 895 8454 2 writer2 785 6785 3 writer3 458 4529
By default, column fills rows first; add -x to fill columns first instead. Empty lines are dropped by default; add -e to keep them.
Format a command's output
mount on its own is hard to read:
mount
Pipe it through column -t to align it:
mount | column -t
Save the formatted output to a file
mount | column -t > mount.out
This writes the aligned output to mount.out instead of the screen.
column is useful anywhere you have delimited or whitespace-separated data that is hard to read as a single run-on line: log files with fixed fields, /etc/passwd-style colon-separated data, or the output of another command you have piped into it, as shown above with mount. It is part of the util-linux package, which ships by default on almost every Linux distribution, so you rarely need to install anything extra to use it.
