HP-UX Reference (11i v2 07/12) - 1 User Commands A-M (vol 1)

col(1) col(1)

International Code Set Support

Single- and multibyte character code sets are supported.

EXAMPLES

col is used most often with nroff and

tbl. A common usage is:

tbl ﬁlename | nroff -man | col | more -s

(very similar to the usual man(1) command). This command allows vertical bars and outer boxes to be

printed for tables. The ﬁle is run through the

tbl preprocessor, and the output is then piped through

nroff, formatting the output using the -man

macros. The formatted output is then piped through col,

which sets up the vertical bars and aligns the columns in the ﬁle. The ﬁle is ﬁnally piped through the

more command, which prints the output to the screen with underlining and highlighting substituted for

italic and bold typefaces. The -s option deletes excess space from the output so that multiple blank lines

are not printed to the screen.

WARNINGS

Cannot back up more than 128 lines. Cannot back up across page boundaries.

There is a maximum limit for the number of characters, including backspaces and overstrikes, on a line.

The maximum limit is at least 800 characters.

Local vertical motions that would result in backing up over the ﬁrst line of the document are ignored. As a

result, the ﬁrst line must not have any superscripts.

This command is likely to be withdrawn from X/Open standards. Applications using this command might

not be portable to other vendors’ systems.