Table of Contents

Introduction to Tabfmt

Tabfmt is a command line utility to format tabular data. The program reads lines from one or more files or from standard input, breaks the lines into fields given a set of input field delimiters, and prints a table with constant-width columns to standard output or a specified file. Minimum and maximum field widths, left and right padding, as well as the characters used for filling, padding and delimiting the fields can be specified.

This program is meant to integrate well with the standard UNIX utilities for text processing. It is specialised in a simple, everyday task which is usually too bothersome to implement in shell scripting. While tabfmt currently formats the table in plain text, extensions may include output in other formats such as HTML, LaTeX, Texinfo, or XML languages.

The program was originally written for the GNU environment, but should build and run on a wide variety of platforms thanks to the GNU autotools and a portability library which is compiled and linked as needed (gnulib). It has been successfully built on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Mac OS X. The program provides support for localisation using the GNU gettext package; a German language translation has been provided by the author. The package contains a preliminary test suite.

The online manual is available at http://tabfmt.sourceforge.net/manual/index.html.

Downloading Tabfmt

Tabfmt releases can be found on http://sourceforge.net/projects/tabfmt.

Tabfmt Mailing Lists

For general Tabfmt discussions, use tabfmt-user AT lists.sourceforge.net. More information, like how to subscribe or unsubscribe to this list, can be found here.

To report a bug in Tabfmt, you should send a bug report to tabfmt-devel AT lists.sourceforge.net. More information, like how to subscribe or unsubscribe to this list, can be found here. Alternatively, you can use the Bug Tracking System.

If you have found a bug in Tabfmt that hasn't yet been fixed in the latest CVS sources of Tabfmt, you should send a patch (made for the CVS sources, not the release sources) to tabfmt-devel AT lists.sourceforge.net. More information, like how to subscribe or unsubscribe to this list, can be found here. Alternatively, you can use the Patch Tracker.

Archives of the mailing lists can be found here:


Visit the project summary page on Sourceforge.

View the ChangeLog.

Please send comments on these web pages to joloc@users.sourceforge.net.

Copyright © 2006 Claudio Jolowicz

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

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