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garyo edited this page Sep 13, 2010 · 2 revisions

Welcome to the colm wiki!

I wrote the original colm at Masscomp in 1988ish out of frustration that ls couldn’t columnate its output if you filtered it with a pipe. Colm aims to do the same sort of columnation that ls does, but for arbitrary text on stdin. It can do variable and fixed-width columns.
Here’s the help text:

Usage: colm [-cglnstvwLT] <files> Use '-' for stdin. Options: -v	variable-width columns (default: fixed-width) -s	spread columns to fit output width (default: don't spread) -g #	separate columns by a #-character 'gutter'. -c #	column width (size) (default: max line length of input) -n #	use # columns (default: program picks max # that will fit) -w #	output width is # characters/line (default: 80) -l #	page length is # lines (default: infinite) -L c	leader character is 'c' (default: space) -t s	use string "s" as separator (default: enough space to line up) -T #	use #-space tabs (default: 8) 

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