Displaying Tables
Previously I used awk when I had data in a tabular format that I wanted to print in aligned columns:
head -n5 /etc/passwd|awk -F: '{printf "%-10s %3s %8d %8d %10s %16s %10s\n", $1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7}'
root x 0 0 root /root /bin/bash
bin x 1 1 bin /bin /sbin/nologin
daemon x 2 2 daemon /sbin /sbin/nologin
adm x 3 4 adm /var/adm /sbin/nologin
lp x 4 7 lp /var/spool/lpd /sbin/nologin
This requires a good deal of fiddling to get column widths correct, the
right number of format strings, etc. A better way to quickly format
output like this is with the column command, included with the
util-linux package:
head -n5 /etc/passwd|column -s: -t
root x 0 0 root /root /bin/bash
bin x 1 1 bin /bin /sbin/nologin
daemon x 2 2 daemon /sbin /sbin/nologin
adm x 3 4 adm /var/adm /sbin/nologin
lp x 4 7 lp /var/spool/lpd /sbin/nologin
This lacks the level of formatting control that one has with the awk
command above and it has to read all of the input before displaying it
(so, for example, formatting output from tail -f will not work), but
for a lot of cases this should be just fine.