I have some tables like this: 
blah blah ;; yada yada ;; etc etc
A much longer field ;; yada yada ;; etc etc
Each field can be any width. I want to align the columns including the delimiters. A command like column removes the delimiter. I want to keep the delimiter. I thought this would have been done already, but I can't find anything. So I'm turning to Perl. Again I thought someone would have done this before, but my search has turned up empty. Do I have to roll my own?

UPDATE: You can scrub this node. This works: 

cat file.txt |sed -e 's/;;/;;@@/g' | column -s '@@' -t
It adds a second, temporary delimiter.

Neil Watson
watson-wilson.ca

In reply to Aligning delimited columns by neilwatson

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