Facts become valuable if they are presented attractively. Console junkies often need to take refuge to spreadsheet programs to display and present their findings to customers and managers. table attempts to obliterate the need to interrupt the console workflow by presenting tabular data in a human digestible form.
Let the console speak for itself:
% ps | table ┌─────┬───────┬──────────┬───────┐ │ PID │ TTY │ TIME │ CMD │ ├─────┼───────┼──────────┼───────┤ │ 139 │ pts/3 │ 00:00:00 │ zsh │ │ 219 │ pts/3 │ 00:00:00 │ ps │ │ 220 │ pts/3 │ 00:00:00 │ table │ └─────┴───────┴──────────┴───────┘
table receives input on STDIN or from file(s), and makes an attractive looking table from this. A growing number of options and output numbers is supported. As table is written in gawk version 4 or more recent, all goodies like regex support for field splitting are available. Some highlights (consult man 1 table for for an extensive list):
| --rst | Output a table for reStructuredText |
| --md | Output a Markdown table |
| --jira | Output a Jira formatted table |
| --title STRING | Set a centered title spanning all the columns. |
| --field-separator | |
| Define the AWK-field separator to be used. | |
| --no-header | Do not display titles for columns. |
table is a front end for the included gawk library libtable. This is of interest to gawk programmers, and allows an array to be passed to make_table, after which a properly formatted table will be returned.
As of yet, the library should be considered unstable. The usage of global variables for configuration is conventient, yet wrong. Attemps to make this nicer resulted in ugliness. Suggestions are welcome.
The table command depends on gawk version 4 or newer. And the command line processing library ngetopt.awk.
Make sure that libtable.awk and ngetopt.awk are in AWKPATH. On many distributions, this will be /usr/share/awk, or /usr/local/share/awk (OS X). You can find out what AWKPATH is by executing gawk 'BEGIN{print ENVIRON["GAWKPATH"]}'.
Probably. Pull requests or issues welcome over at GitHub.