Arrange long Command Output in Columns
There's this one command whose output you need to look at again and again.
It's a long list of short words and whizzes by too fast and using your terminal's
scroll function is cumbersome.
Of course there's more
or less
, but that is cumbersome, too!
Searching the web for a solution only leeds to more complex problem, until on
the third try I found column
.
It does exactly what I want without adding any options, and it's already installed
as part of util-linux
(1). Example:
fluxbox -list-commands | column
(1) One of these days I'm going to have to take a closer look at util-linux
.
It includes 110 executables!
pacman -Ql util-linux | sed -n 's/^.*\/bin\///p' | wc -l
Another usage example for column:
pacman -Ql util-linux | sed -n 's/^.*\/bin\///p' | column
.
That, and coreutils:
pacman -Ql coreutils | sed -n 's/^.*\/bin\///p' | column
.
For Debian-based systems try something like
dpkg -L coreutils | sed -n 's/^.*\/bin\///p' | column
.
Oops, my debian machine lists only 37 packages for util-linux:
dpkg -L util-linux | sed -n 's/^.*\/bin\///p' | wc -l