COLUMN(1) General Commands Manual COLUMN(1)

column — columnate lists

column [-tx] [-c columns] [-s sep] [file ...]

The column utility formats its input into multiple columns. Rows are filled before columns. Input is taken from file operands, or, by default, from the standard input. Empty lines are ignored.

The options are as follows:

Output is formatted for a display columns wide.
Specify a set of characters to be used to delimit columns for the -t option.
Determine the number of columns the input contains and create a table. Columns are delimited with whitespace, by default, or with the characters supplied using the -s option. Useful for pretty-printing displays.
Fill columns before filling rows.

The COLUMNS, LANG, LC_ALL and LC_CTYPE environment variables affect the execution of column as described in environ(7).

The column utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

(printf "PERM LINKS OWNER GROUP SIZE MONTH DAY " ; \
printf "HH:MM/YEAR NAME\n" ; \
ls -l | sed 1d) | column -t

colrm(1), ls(1), paste(1), sort(1)

The column command appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno.

Input lines are limited to LINE_MAX (2048) bytes in length.

July 29, 2004 macOS 15.0