From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.0 (2014-02-07) on aws-us-west-2-korg-lkml-1.web.codeaurora.org Received: from vger.kernel.org (vger.kernel.org [23.128.96.18]) by smtp.lore.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E704EC433FE for ; Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:43:10 +0000 (UTC) Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S229545AbiJMUnK (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:43:10 -0400 Received: from lindbergh.monkeyblade.net ([23.128.96.19]:44328 "EHLO lindbergh.monkeyblade.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S229437AbiJMUnI (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Oct 2022 16:43:08 -0400 Received: from mout.kundenserver.de (mout.kundenserver.de [217.72.192.75]) by lindbergh.monkeyblade.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 6FB24169CDB for ; Thu, 13 Oct 2022 13:43:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [192.168.101.10] ([91.12.163.236]) by mrelayeu.kundenserver.de (mreue107 [212.227.15.183]) with ESMTPSA (Nemesis) id 1MEF87-1otE3v0Jin-00AB49; Thu, 13 Oct 2022 22:43:02 +0200 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="------------bQ2vNlIm7ILeO1tyTk8e32YV" Message-ID: <08dd1386-3511-2f1a-b041-0a445d34ae1a@bernhard-voelker.de> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2022 22:43:01 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.3.1 Subject: Re: Proposal for new column(1) flag To: Thomas Voss , util-linux@vger.kernel.org References: Content-Language: en-US From: Bernhard Voelker In-Reply-To: X-Provags-ID: V03:K1:S7BgC6iDMqtTajQsvfZDMqijmhgpLTgn7lFda/K5jHI5OdPxh73 njxpUwTba/NmS40MKho+2PKShtn9s21MNMNbHikiYGR5ApkXuiN0ecOFmAIq+Mj0ahrDKxm j4djl6mGRYyVhsVfMwbq3c81FTAuAbX/aUQzBtPQaRqvbYPoEdnsOnZfYIjuhjnhC1hf+9E g9ZZAYER+EvwxnnEjKeRg== X-UI-Out-Filterresults: notjunk:1;V03:K0:85EfRqSP0p4=:pks3ATpfK4P8qgpdpdDe6M 2eYmuNo6kSU3EEpLIa1BIwimSBh1UVGxheAvEP7uGv+C6uUdYgcFLdE0fPMiHEYVPPlpFDqW/ cQWHxyYE25d1NAmfGUN8YfJrDxRZG1ELKLs4StLcCS3TrzRURt+T4bZfHDqd3aGMMQCoDAniw VUrO2bX4BQGRsqqteSjvKFmTmkDOsj4m/emQDmdMFQsGvnnvTPJkVPSiNrqXB4qVc70jDQGfG F5hVasGJkBfNi+hb1aTPC07jyXH4FXgXPwvJROkX9RM6X8l3D1Jr8BYZbIBfoy9LNJ1Hx+f+0 S73ANd0Sf4yNcBGMlnEPKyBSxFp8P9u3LjbHQqhhus4PbbltDoLFvF8G/dmEdQcdVjmZRoYz4 RGMCg2dxeKob92PMUtR8QPnzyBOXhvi2fR+qvmk+pqGfx6Djys+ddRPY8361DzzmzpY/+OSJJ uPE1apeaAgK/kp6Ov6ehwY0KlF3U8Jzd8gJr0/UMBS/TbXcC0QdQmgj5/7zKtFKyKTww0lKZ3 ZR+DdsJkh1ie16fFUyof/AzcO5HRCphP/iu24K3vrzOEijTHciU3qkfwPloYRu/KSt6jIMGmj CaSCwbCrOZc1V0N0ltBTn8tvuukIqgHWiJKZ2hoLtZHKvGWoN7FIp5UP9/QKh8pNpN7Hce/JG HHVTGxTW+TzYXu/RGskpNIwb+v8acmoSq5mK4flPbvQY3v1qwQMrcnUPNi90PDtbEtK1PTjiu PlM5lWz147zSWk/ydCEK5SOh2bff0gQB1DneHQZwgTPMeodV7kM91NL4oh4ojG3NDRbvWjGEt 2YUAxbjyK56UAPnCHykP8FQH5D+bg== Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: util-linux@vger.kernel.org This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --------------bQ2vNlIm7ILeO1tyTk8e32YV Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On 10/13/22 21:26, Thomas Voss wrote: > Hello there, > > I'm not sure if this is exactly the right place to ask, so forgive me if > it isn't but I was thinking of a potential new flag for the column(1) > utility and would like to get some feedback on whether or not it would > even be accepted before I try to submit a patch. > > The basic issue I am aiming to fix is this: When you have a bunch of > lines and you want to display them in a more "human friendly" manner, you > may decide to display them using columns. This is what ls does as the > default behavior when listing files and we can in theory do this by > piping the output of whatever command we run into column. The issue I > found however is that the way column operates is by splitting each row > into multiple columns where every column has the same width (a width > which can hold the longest input line). ls on the other hand tries to > make each column as thin as possible, with a gap of two spaces between > each column. This means that in many cases ls can fit the same data into > more columns than center can. > > Now when listing files this is not a problem, you can always use ls > instead of center. But I recently found myself wanting to do this with a > list of movies that I had stored in a file, and so being able to just the > following would be much more convenient, but the gaps between the columns > is just too large: > > $ column movie-list > > So my proposal is to add a new flag, perhaps -g (g for gap) which allows > you to specify how wide you want the gaps between the columns to be in > spaces, and then to columnate that way. That change would make these two > lines identical: > > $ ls * > $ ls * | column -g 2 > > - Thomas Hmm, you missed to give actual examples. Is it like the output of this? $ ls * | column -xc $COLUMNS | column -t (Example output in attached file to avoid line wrapping in the email.) 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