Display Command Output or File Contents in Column Format

To display the content of a file in a clear and organized format, start by using the `cat` command. For example, to view the contents of the `ucartz-authors.txt` file, run:

$ cat ucartz-authors.txt

Sample Output:
pos|author|articles|comments
1|ebin|895|8454
2|vyga|785|6785
3|rahul|458|4529

To make this output more readable, you can use the `column` command, which neatly arranges data in columns. The `-t` option automatically determines the number of columns, and `-s` specifies the delimiter (in this case, the pipe symbol `|`).

$ cat ucartz-authors.txt | column -t -s "|"

Sample Output:
pos author articles comments
1 ebin 895 8454
2 vyga 785 6785
3 rahul 458 4529

By default, the `column` command fills rows first. To switch this and fill columns first, use the `-x` flag. If you want to include empty lines in the output (which are ignored by default), use the `-e` flag.

Here's another practical example. First, run the following command to view the current mounted file systems:

$ mount

Now, use the `column` command to neatly format the output:

$ mount | column -t

Sample Output:
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=4013172k,nr_inodes=1003293,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,size=806904k,mode=755)
/dev/sda10 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)

To save the formatted output to a file, simply use output redirection:

$ mount | column -t > mount.out

This command will save the neatly formatted output to a file named `mount.out`.

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