[colug-432] Nice Plain Text Columns and Avoiding NIH: expand: not

[Richard Holbert]

On 08/08/2011 10:50 AM, Seth Hall wrote:
> On Aug 8, 2011, at 10:14 AM, Richard Holbert wrote:
>
>> cat foo.txt | column -t -s $','
> I use this for Bro a lot since the default output in the next release is tab-separated columns.  To specify tab as the column separator (which the original posted had) you need to give the -s argument a literal tab character.  I usually do this...
>
> 	cat foo.txt | column -t -s "<ctrl-v><tab>"
>
> To specify a literal tab, you have to first type ctrl-v.
>
>    .Seth
>
> --
> Seth Hall
> International Computer Science Institute
> (Bro) because everyone has a network
> http://www.bro-ids.org/
Seth,

Please try the following to see if it also works as expected:

cat foo.txt | column -t -s $'\t'

Using this format might make it easier to debug if it's embedded into a 
script instead of using the "<ctrl-v><tab>" format.

Although, I must admit that <ctrl-v><tab> looks like a handy option for 
one-liners...

Thanks!