Hello there, I'm not sure if this is exactly the right place to ask, so forgive me if it isn't but I was thinking of a potential new flag for the column(1) utility and would like to get some feedback on whether or not it would even be accepted before I try to submit a patch. The basic issue I am aiming to fix is this: When you have a bunch of lines and you want to display them in a more "human friendly" manner, you may decide to display them using columns. This is what ls does as the default behavior when listing files and we can in theory do this by piping the output of whatever command we run into column. The issue I found however is that the way column operates is by splitting each row into multiple columns where every column has the same width (a width which can hold the longest input line). ls on the other hand tries to make each column as thin as possible, with a gap of two spaces between each column. This means that in many cases ls can fit the same data into more columns than center can. Now when listing files this is not a problem, you can always use ls instead of center. But I recently found myself wanting to do this with a list of movies that I had stored in a file, and so being able to just the following would be much more convenient, but the gaps between the columns is just too large: $ column movie-list So my proposal is to add a new flag, perhaps -g (g for gap) which allows you to specify how wide you want the gaps between the columns to be in spaces, and then to columnate that way. That change would make these two lines identical: $ ls * $ ls * | column -g 2 - Thomas
