How to adjust cli output into pretty columns

Question

Let's say I have some CLI one-liner, which outputs some lines of text with space-separated parts. Those parts should logically be columns, but because of text width it doesn't look so.

How could I automatically format such output to make it pretty columns?

For example, I have output like

Alice param1 param2345 32768 50 16
Bob param2345 param1 512 10 1
_debug_user_ param0 param0 0 0 0

And I want to make it like

Alice        param1    param2345 32768 50 16
Bob          param2345 param1    512   10 1
_debug_user_ param0    param0    0     0  0

Answer 1

With Linux column(1):

column -t <file.txt

With BSD rs(1):

rs 0 6 <file.txt

With awk(1):

awk 'FNR==NR { for(i=1; i<NF; i++) if(length($i)>w[i]) w[i]=length($i) }
     FNR!=NR { for(i=1; i<NF; i++) $i=sprintf("%-" (w[i]+1) "s", $i); print }' \
        file.txt file.txt