Run the cat command below to view the rootadminz-authors.txt file.
$ cat ucartz-authors.txt
Sample Output
pos|author|articles|comments
1|ebin|895|8454
2|vyga|785|6785
3|rahul|458|4529
Using the column command, we can display a much clear output as follows, where the -t helps to determine the number of columns the input contains and creates a table and the -s specifies a delimiter character.
$ 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, rows are filled before columns, to fill columns before filling rows use the -x switch and to instruct column command consider empty lines (which are ignored by default), include the -e flag.
Here is another practical example, run the two commands below and see difference to further understand the magic column can do
$ mount $ 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) tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (rw,mode=755) cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,release_agent=/ ....
To save the nicely formatted output in a file, use the output redirection as shown.
$ mount | column -t >mount.out
