On 10/13/22 21:26, Thomas Voss wrote:
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
Hmm, you missed to give actual examples. Is it like the output of this?
$ ls * | column -xc $COLUMNS | column -t
(Example output in attached file to avoid line wrapping in the email.)
Have a nice day,
Berny
A$ AA$ AABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa1 AABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa2
AABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb1 AABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb2 AABCDEFHIJKLMNOPqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm AABCDEFHIJKLMNOPz1234
AABCDEFa1 AABCDEFa2 AABCDEFb1 AABCDEFb2
AABCDEFqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm AABCDEFz1234 ABCDEFA$ ABCDEFABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa1
ABCDEFABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa2 ABCDEFABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb1 ABCDEFABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb2 ABCDEFABCDEFHIJKLMNOPqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm
ABCDEFABCDEFHIJKLMNOPz1234 ABCDEFABCDEFa1 ABCDEFABCDEFa2 ABCDEFABCDEFb1
ABCDEFABCDEFb2 ABCDEFABCDEFqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm ABCDEFABCDEFz1234 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPA$
ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa1 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa2 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb1 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb2
ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFHIJKLMNOPqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFHIJKLMNOPz1234 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFa1 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFa2
ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFb1 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFb2 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPABCDEFz1234
ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa1 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPa2 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb1 ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPb2
ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm ABCDEFHIJKLMNOPz1234 ABCDEFa1 ABCDEFa2
ABCDEFb1 ABCDEFb2 ABCDEFqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm ABCDEFz1234
Aa1 Aa2 Ab1 Ab2
Aqwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm Az1234 a1 a2
b1 b2 qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm z1234
