NAME

table — Command line utility to format and display CSV and TSV

SYNOPSIS

COMMAND ALIASES

DESCRIPTION

table is a command line utility to format and display CSV and TSV. It parses the file given by pathname or standard input and prints out a table representing its contents using Unicode characters for box drawing.

When specifying multiple pathname arguments, table prints a warning to stderr. Only the first such argument is processed. If pathname is omitted, table reads standard input.

-a alignment, --align=alignment

Set column alignments. alignment is a string consisting of characters l, c or r, which respectively set the alignment of the corresponding column to left, center or right. For example, -arccc sets the alignment for the first column to right, and the next three columns to center.

-b, --border-mode

Border mode: force single column.

-c cols, --columns=cols

Set maximum table width in columns (default 80).

-D, --align-dot

Set alignment character to dot “.” instead of a space “ ”.

-d delim, --delimiter=delim

Set field delimiter (default “,”). First line of the input determines the number of table columns. The first character of delim becomes the delimiter. Special characters, like “;”,need to be quoted or escaped:

$ table -d';'

or

$ table -d\;

In the examples above, “'” and “\” are parsed by the shell and are not passed to table, so are not considered as “first characters” for the assignment.

Note that the -b parameter takes precedence: if it is present, -d is ignored.

-f format, --format=format

Set widths for individual columns as ratio. Parameter format should be a string of weights separated by colons. For example:

$ table -c 50 -s aa examples/quotes-english.csv
+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
|ID         |Name       |Surname    |Age        |
|001        |John       |Smith      |34         |
|002        |Steven     |Watson     |23         |
|003        |Richard    |Smith      |33         |
|007        |Bond, James|Bond       |46         |
+-----------+-----------+-----------+-----------+
$ table -f 1:2:3:4 -c 50 -s aa examples/quotes-english.csv
+----+---------+-------------+------------------+
|ID  |Name     |Surname      |Age               |
|001 |John     |Smith        |34                |
|002 |Steven   |Watson       |23                |
|003 |Richard  |Smith        |33                |
|007 |Bond, Jam|Bond         |46                |
+----+---------+-------------+------------------+
$ table -f 1:5:5:1 -c 50 -s aa examples/quotes-english.csv
+----+------------------+------------------+----+
|ID  |Name              |Surname           |Age |
|001 |John              |Smith             |34  |
|002 |Steven            |Watson            |23  |
|003 |Richard           |Smith             |33  |
|007 |Bond, James       |Bond              |46  |
+----+------------------+------------------+----+

-H, --align-header

Makes the column alignment also apply to header row. The default behavior is to print header cells left-aligned.

-h, --help

Print the usage information screen.

-m, --msdos

Ignore carriage return (\r) characters in input. The default behavior is to treat them as part of the text, which can produce unexpected results.

-n, --no-ansi

Turn off ANSI SGR codes in the output. By default, the header row is printed in bold using ANSI codes if the stdout is a tty. This switch prevents that.

-p, --pause

Presents the message “Press Enter to continue” and waits for input after outputting the table. This accounts for executing table from file managers which don't pause after executing programs or as a single command from terminal emulators.

-q behavior, --quotes=behavior

behavior can be one of the following:

process

Treats everything between the quotes as a single column. Treats consecutive quotes within the quoted text as literal quotes. This is the default.

ignore

Ignores the special meaning of quotes (like TSV). This is the default if table is called as tsvtable.

-s set, --symbols=set

Use table symbol set set for table lines, where set is one of the following (format: ⟨border⟩⟨inner border⟩):

Literal	Meaning
aa	ascii-ascii,
ae	ascii-empty,
dd	double-double,
ds	double-single (default),
de	double-empty,
ea	empty-ascii,
ed	empty-double,
ee	empty-empty,
es	empty-single,
sd	single-double,
se	single-empty,
ss	single-single.

Any other value for set will produce an error.

-t, --expand-tabs

Expand tabs to spaces, honoring standard modulo 8 tab stops. Default behavior is to output tab characters as-is.

Note that the -d parameter takes precedence, unless -b is also used: if the delimiter is set to the TAB character (0x09), -t is ignored. When -b is used in addition, -t is honored and -d ignored.

-V, --full-version

Print full version (like -v), followed by copyright notice, and exit.

-v, --version

Print program version and commit date, and exit.

-y, --yes-ansi

Explicitly turn on ANSI SGR codes in the output. By default, the header row is printed in bold using ANSI codes, unless the stdout is not a tty. This switch enforces the output of ANSI SGR codes, even in that case.

EXIT STATUS

The table utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

EXAMPLES

• Periodically display CPU load information in a single-line table (requires a mounted Linux-style /proc file system and GNU watch(1))

  $ watch "table /proc/loadavg -d ' ' -c 50 -n -s ss"

• Format a long list of files in the current directory in a double line table with single-line column divisors

  $ LC_ALL=C ls -l | tail -n +2 | sed -E 's/ +/ /g' | table -d ' ' -n

  Caution: format of ls(1) is not standardized, so this example might not work as intended.

• Print information from /etc/passwd in a table:

  $ table -n -d : -f 3:1:1:1:4:4:4 /etc/passwd

• Same as above, without borders and with different column alignment:

  $ table -n -H -d: -arccclll -see -f3:1:1:1:4:4:4 /etc/passwd

SEE ALSO

awk(1), sed(1)

AUTHORS

Strahinya Radich <sr@strahinja.org>, 2020-2024

BUGS

Bugs can be reported using the ticket tracker at: https://todo.sr.ht/~strahinja/table