[colug-432] Nice Plain Text Columns and Avoiding NIH

[R P Herrold]

On Sun, 7 Aug 2011, jep200404 at columbus.rr.com wrote:

> I was hoping to avoid writing my own code for that.
> This seems like the kind of thing that has been solved many
> times before (like for the output of ls -l).
> I was hoping to avoid reinventing (or recoding) the wheel.

bash carries a printf as well; the echo command has the -n 
option, and one can do 'counted spaces' justification with 
functions as well

Other scripting languages carry similar functionality as well

I don't see that this is _not_ an already solved problem

-- Russ herrold