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 --separation-regex ':'
below cmd output started 2026 Thu Jan 01 09:52:02 AM PST
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
above cmd output done    2026 Thu Jan 01 09:52:02 AM PST

The usage message looks like:

$ expand-nicely --help
below cmd output started 2026 Thu Jan 01 09:51:43 AM PST
Usage: /usr/local/bin/expand-nicely --separation-regex '   *|\t' --maxsplit 3 --output-separator '  ' --help

--separation-regex 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
above cmd output done    2026 Thu Jan 01 09:51:43 AM PST

Hits: 125
Timestamp: 2026-05-08 01:38:33 PDT

Back to Dan's tech tidbits

You can e-mail the author with questions or comments: