expand-nicely

expand-nicely is a script that reads lines of text, splits them into fields on an arbitrary regex, and prints them with fields padded to line up vertically.

EG:

$ head /etc/passwd | ./expand-nicely --input-separator ':'
root    x  0      0  root    /root            /bin/bash
daemon  x  1      1  daemon  /usr/sbin        /usr/sbin/nologin
bin     x  2      2  bin     /bin             /usr/sbin/nologin
sys     x  3      3  sys     /dev             /usr/sbin/nologin
sync    x  4  65534  sync    /bin             /bin/sync
games   x  5     60  games   /usr/games       /usr/sbin/nologin
man     x  6     12  man     /var/cache/man   /usr/sbin/nologin
lp      x  7      7  lp      /var/spool/lpd   /usr/sbin/nologin
mail    x  8      8  mail    /var/mail        /usr/sbin/nologin
news    x  9      9  news    /var/spool/news  /usr/sbin/nologin

The usage message looks like:

$ ./expand-nicely --help
Usage: ./expand-nicely --input-separator '   *|\t' --maxsplit 3 --output-separator '  ' --help

--input-separator re         the regular expression used to divide lines of input into fields
--maxsplit n                 split each line into a maximum of n+1 columns, where the n+1th may contain
                             zero or more occurences of your separation regex.  0 says to split on all
                             occurences
--output-separator string    the string used to separate fields in adjacent output columns

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Timestamp: 2026-09-15 23:50:28 PDT

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