Here I’ve used the VIM text editor to create a simple address book. You can see the first line contains the column titles: Salutation, Name, Street, City and Zip. Each remaining line represents one row in the table, with each row containing one record or entry in the address book. If that sounds a bit like a spreadsheet or database to you, you’re not wrong. Both spreadsheet and database software can import CSV files.

Using the UNIX command cat to display the contents of the file kind of works, except this CSV file contains more lines than the display can show, so the first few rows end up getting cut off. To fix this, we can use the pipe symbol to redirect the output to another UNIX command, less. So entering:

cat Fake_Address_Book.csv | less

Output is displayed to the screen as before - except now it “pauses” when it reaches the limits of what the screen can show at one time. You can use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard to scroll through the file contents.When you’re done viewing the file, press ‘q’ on your keyboard to quit.

This is a definite improvent, But the contents of our “table” are still are scrunched together. There has to be a way make it look more like a table. Well, of course there is.

The UNIX column command displays the contents of a specified file in, well, columns. So this time we’ll be redirecting the output of cat to the column and then the less commands to provide some formatting prior to display:

cat Fake_Address_Book.csv | column -t -s “,”  | less

There’s two options being set in column: “-t” and “-s”. “-t” instructs column to format the output as a table. “-s” tells column what character is being used to separate the columns in the table, in this case, a comma. The options are followed by the name of the file we want column to display. As before, the pipe symbol redirects the output to another program, less, to  “pause” the output to allow us to scroll through the contents of the file, since it still contains too many lines for the terminal to display at one time. This command results in...

Nice! Just like before, you can use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the file contents and press ‘q’ when you’re finished.

There seems to be a glitch with this in many Unixes, including Mac OS X, where if there is an empty column, the column to the right is shifted over to to the left to fill it. This is probably not the behavior you’re looking for.

I’ve used VIM to empty fields on a couple of records.

Running the commands again, we can see that in rows with empty fields, columns to the right of the empty fields were shifted one column to the left. To work around this, we’re going use the sed command to add some whitespace before each comma. A field containing space is technically not empty. We’ll be using the pipe command once again to redirect the output.  Here’s what the final commands look like:

cat Fake_Address_Book.csv | sed ‘s/,/ ,/g’ | column -t -s “,” | less

This gives the output:

Thank you, sed! It’s worth noting that sed just modifies the output to the display, not the actual file itself. If you wanted to print out a hard copy of the file, you could use the pipe command to redirect to either lpr or enscript, depending on your preferences. I prefer enscript, so...

cat Fake_Address_Book.csv | sed ‘s/,/ ,/g’ | column -t -s “,” | enscript -r --no-header --margins=“36:36:36:36 --font=Courier11

which gave me...