Formatting lists with the column command in *nix

Question

I'm trying to format a list of entries in bash, and am using the column command. However, the -t option defaults to using any whitespace as a delimiter, which does not work for the data I have (it contains spaces and tabs). I can't figure out how to get the -s flag to specify a newline character as the sole column delimiter.

Answer 1

In theory, to specify a newline, you can use the $'...' notation, which is just like '...' except that it supports C-style escape-sequences:

column -t -s $'\n' list-of-entries.txt

However, I don't really understand the purpose of this. A newline is the row delimiter, so a column-delimiter of $'\n' is equivalent to not having any column-delimiter at all:

column -t -s '' list-of-entries.txt

which means that the input will be treated as having only one column; so it's equivalent to not using column at all:

cat list-of-entries.txt

It seems like you actually don't want to use the -t flag, because the purpose of the -t flag is to ensure that each line of input becomes one line of output, and it doesn't sound like that's what you want. I'm guessing you want this:

column list-of-entries.txt

which will treat each line of list-of-entries.txt as a value to be put in one cell of the table that column outputs.

Answer 2

This works to output a pretty print version of a tab delimited file

column -t -s $'\t' list-of-entries.txt