Re: Proposal for new column(1) flag

[Bernhard Voelker <mail@bernhard-voelker.de>]

oh, your 2 emails indeed didn't come thru ... I guess because there were 3 attachments.

Hereby forwarding...

On 10/17/22 12:27, Thomas Voss wrote:
> NOTE: Sorry if this email is a duplicate, I have been trying to send this
> for a good while but theres something wrong with my email client
> configuration that I need to try to figure out.
> 
> Also in my first email I made some references to "center", I actually
> meant to say "column", center is just a tool I was writing some code for
> when sending that email so it was stuck in my head.
> 
> ---
> 
> On Thu Oct 13, 2022 at 10:43 PM CEST, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
>> Hmm, you missed to give actual examples.  Is it like the output of
>> this?
>>
>>     $ ls * | column -xc $COLUMNS | column -t
> 
> Not quite, let me give you a real-world example (and the thing that
> prompted me to think of adding this feature).
> 
> I have a simple script on my system that has a list of movies, and I want
> to be able to display them all nicely in columns.  At the moment I am
> doing this, which is not optimal because the gaps between columns are too
> large, it results in 5 columns and 8 rows:
> 
>     $ column -x movie-list
> 
> This is what your suggestion looks like, and it also resuts in 5 columns
> and 8 rows but much more squished together:
> 
>     $ column -xc $COLUMNS movie-list | column -t
> 
> And finally this is a really stupid solution which creates a file for
> each line of the file and then uses ls to print them, it results in 6
> columns and 6 rows, which is more space-efficient, and what I would like
> to be able to get as output:
> 
>     #!/bin/sh
> 
>     while read f; do
>             touch $f
>     done <../movie-list
>     ls *
>     rm *
> 
> The outputs are included in files attached to this email

Have a nice day,
Berny