Home

Welcome to the colm wiki!

I wrote the original colm at Masscomp in 1988ish out of frustration that ls couldn’t columnate its output if you filtered it with a pipe. Colm aims to do the same sort of columnation that ls does, but for arbitrary text on stdin. It can do variable and fixed-width columns.
Here’s the help text:

Usage: colm [-cglnstvwLT] <files>
 Use '-' for stdin.
 Options:
 -v	variable-width columns (default: fixed-width)
 -s	spread columns to fit output width (default: don't spread)
 -g #	separate columns by a #-character 'gutter'.
 -c #	column width (size) (default: max line length of input)
 -n #	use # columns (default: program picks max # that will fit)
 -w #	output width is # characters/line (default: 80)
 -l #	page length is # lines (default: infinite)
 -L c	leader character is 'c' (default: space)
 -t s	use string "s" as separator (default: enough space to line up)
 -T #	use #-space tabs (default: 8)