PrettyTable

PrettyTable is a simple shell implementation to draw nice looking ascii tables with auto sizing columns to the screen.

Prerequisites

The column utillity as well as sed are needed for this script to work.

The implementation has been tested using bash as well as zsh.

Installation

Options

• Copy and paste the code in your script
• Download it and chmod +x the script then save it somewhere on your PATH and source it
• If you have basher then basher install jakobwesthoff/prettytable.sh

Usage

You may either source the prettytable.sh file or use it as an executable. Both works just fine. See Installation for install options.

Multiline table data is simply piped into prettytable for formating, while the number of columns needs to be specified. Columns need to be delimited using a \t (Tab) character.

Optionally a color may be specified as second argument to prettytable. This color will be used to to color the header text. Available colors:

• blue
• green
• cyan
• red
• purple
• yellow
• gray
• light_blue
• light_green
• light_cyan
• light_red
• light_purple
• light_yellow
• light_gray

Example

{
 printf 'PID\tUSER\tAPPNAME\n';
 printf '%s\t%s\t%s\n' "1" "john" "foo bar";
 printf '%s\t%s\t%s\n' "12345678" "someone_with_a_long_name" "blub blib blab bam boom";
} | prettytable 3

┌──────────┬──────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┐
│PID       │USER                      │APPNAME                  │
├──────────┼──────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────┤
│1         │john                      │foo bar                  │
│12345678  │someone_with_a_long_name  │blub blib blab bam boom  │
└──────────┴──────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────┘

NOTE: The spacing between lines is a result of Githubs formatting and should not occure in your terminal.