Unix & Linux Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Linux, FreeBSD and other Un*x-like operating systems. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'd like to tabularize a file with the column command:
$ column -c 60 file.txt
The output is nice on the screen, but unusable for my purposes because the items are seperated by tabs. for further processing, I need them as whitespace.
Of course, I cannot just replace one tab with one space because this would destroy the left-alignment of the 2nd, 3rd etc column.
Surely this is as simple as mentioned in the first comment. But here it is, spelled out:
column -c 60 file.txt | expand
expandfrom GNUcoreutilsconverts tabs to spaces. There are many other ways, f.i. using Vim.-soption in the manpage, did you?column -t -s ' 'works insofar as it uses spaces instead of tabs as column separators. As the manpage describes: "-t [...] Useful for pretty-printing displays.".-sworks well with-tbut I am not asking for input seperators, but for output seperators. Apologies if my question was not clear.