Column
From Leo's Notes
Last edited on 18 August 2023, at 21:59.
Column is a utility that formats data into neat columns. Rather than relying on inserting the proper number of spaces or tabs, you can pipe your output through column to have the output look spectacular.
Usage
Just pipe whatever you want columnized through column -t and it will format it into a nice table.
% for i in apple orange banana pear ; do echo $i "\$0.00" ; done | column -t
apple $0.00
orange $0.00
banana $0.00
pear $0.00
Example applications
Watch Linux port counters
Although the Receive/Transmit lines are mismatched (on the first line), it is a lot easier to read this than the raw output from /proc/net/dev. I typically then watch the port counters in conjunction with the watch command: watch -d -n 1 "cat /proc/net/dev | tr '|' ' ' | column -t"
Example output:
# cat /proc/net/dev | tr '|' ' ' | column -t
Inter- Receive Transmit
face bytes packets errs drop fifo frame compressed multicast bytes packets errs drop fifo colls carrier compressed
lo: 5217334816196 1656330248 0 0 0 0 0 0 5217334816196 1656330248 0 0 0 0 0 0
eno3: 12385201379767 10995758725 0 1031 0 0 0 162175103 495954146757 4117060272 0 0 0 0 0 0
eno4: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
eno1np0: 85133723077447 101269770828 0 0 0 0 0 1574 167232033724542 129467009423 0 0 0 0 0 0
eno2np1: 437322690750946 211939829225 0 8768343 0 0 0 17 311757943459204 148155482836 0 0 0 0 0 0
ib0: 82821062753028 51292209226 0 0 0 0 0 0 45818958606850 37295454471 0 0 0 0 0 0
ib1: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0