Comments on: How to Use the Linux column Command to Format Text into Tables

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 10:32:16 +0000

I found your post. A very nice intro to the 'column' command. I had encountered an issue. I have a tab-delimited file with all rows sharing the same number of columns (including the header), except that the first field in the header row is an empty string. I tried the column command, but never get the header row aligned properly with the remaining rows (The empty string is ignored for some reason)

By: karthick sudhakar

karthick sudhakar — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 01:58:25 +0000

In reply to Ubuntu User. @Ubuntu User I have not tested it out on Ubuntu 20.10. But I have tested it on Ubuntu 20.04.

tecmint@LinuxHowTo:~$ column --version
column: invalid option -- '-'
usage: column [-txne] [-c columns] [-s sep] [file ...]
tecmint@LinuxHowTo:~$ column -version
column: invalid option -- 'v'
usage: column [-txne] [-c columns] [-s sep] [file ...]
tecmint@LinuxHowTo:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Release:	20.04
Codename:	focal

By: Ubuntu User

Ubuntu User — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 17:05:15 +0000

On Ubuntu 20.10, when I run column --version, I get column from util-linux 2.36.