Unix Tip: Printing in columns

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Regardless of how sophisticated Unix has become, one of its ever-endearing qualities is the ease with which the command line can be used to select, manipulate and display data. Clever little languages like sed and awk continue to remind me why it was so much fun to sit down with the early O'Reilly books, trying each new little "trick" that they taught me and discovering just how much processing I could do via simple scripts. And, while I rarely write awk scripts these days, there are occasions in which it is the perfect tool for the task. In this week's column, we're going to look at a couple tools for creating columnar output from a list of strings -- a simple task, but one that I hate to do "by hand".

In the first of two scripts, data arriving in a list such as this:

would be processed to look like this:

This rearrangement of data can be helpful if, for example, you are including a list of file names or numbers in a text file and want to include multiple items in each row to shorten the length of the inserted text.

For anyone who hasn't written awk scripts. it's useful to know that awk processes one line of input at a time and that it automatically assigns each string on a line to the variables $1, $2 and so on ($0 represents the entire line of input).

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