Sun Microsystems, Inc. gratefully acknowledges The Open Group for
permission to reproduce portions of its copyrighted documentation.
Original documentation from The Open Group can be obtained online at
http://www.opengroup.org/bookstore/.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and The Open
Group, have given us permission to reprint portions of their
documentation.
In the following statement, the phrase ``this text'' refers to portions
of the system documentation.
Portions of this text are reprinted and reproduced in electronic form
in the SunOS Reference Manual, from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 Edition,
Standard for Information Technology -- Portable Operating System
Interface (POSIX), The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6,
Copyright (C) 2001-2004 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc and The Open Group. In the event of any discrepancy
between these versions and the original IEEE and The Open Group
Standard, the original IEEE and The Open Group Standard is the referee
document. The original Standard can be obtained online at
http://www.opengroup.org/unix/online.html.
This notice shall appear on any product containing this material.
The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
Common Development and Distribution License (the "License").
You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE
or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions
and limitations under the License.
When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each
file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE.
If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the
fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying
information: Portions Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]
Copyright 1989 AT&T
Portions Copyright (c) 1992, X/Open Company Limited. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright (c) 1995, Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
col [-bfpx]
The col utility reads from the standard input and writes to the standard output. It performs the line overlays implied by reverse line-feeds, and by forward and reverse half-line-feeds. Unless -x is used, all blank characters in the input will be converted to tab characters wherever possible. col is particularly useful for filtering multi-column output made with the .rt command of nroff(1) and output resulting from use of the tbl(1) preprocessor.
The ASCII control characters SO and SI are assumed by col to start and end text in an alternative character set. The character set to which each input character belongs is remembered, and on output SI and SO characters are generated as appropriate to ensure that each character is written in the correct character set.
On input, the only control characters accepted are space, backspace, tab, carriage-return and newline characters, SI, SO, VT, reverse line-feed, forward half-line-feed and reverse half-line-feed. The VT character is an alternative form of full reverse line-feed, included for compatibility with some earlier programs of this type. The only other characters to be copied to the output are those that are printable.
The ASCII codes for the control functions and line-motion sequences mentioned above are as given in the table below. ESC stands for the ASCII escape character, with the octal code 033; ESC- means a sequence of two characters, ESC followed by the character x.
| reverse line-feed ESC-7 |
| reverse half-line-feed ESC-8 |
| forward half-line-feed ESC-9 |
| vertical-tab (VT) 013 |
| start-of-text (SO) 016 |
| end-of-text (SI) 017 |
Assume that the output device in use is not capable of backspacing. In this case, if two or more characters are to appear in the same place, only the last one read will be output.
Although col accepts half-line motions in its input, it normally does not emit them on output. Instead, text that would appear between lines is moved to the next lower full-line boundary. This treatment can be suppressed by the -f (fine) option; in this case, the output from col may contain forward half-line-feeds (ESC-9), but will still never contain either kind of reverse line motion.
Normally, col will ignore any escape sequences unknown to it that are found in its input; the -p option may be used to cause col to output these sequences as regular characters, subject to overprinting from reverse line motions. The use of this option is highly discouraged unless the user is fully aware of the textual position of the escape sequences.
Prevent col from converting blank characters to tab characters on output wherever possible. Tab stops are considered to be at each column position n such that n modulo 8 equals 1.
See environ(5) for descriptions of the following environment variables that affect the execution of col: LC_CTYPE, LC_MESSAGES, and NLSPATH.
The following error values are returned: 0
Successful completion.
An error occurred.
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
| CSI enabled |
nroff(1), tbl(1), ascii(5), attributes(5), environ(5)
The input format accepted by col matches the output produced by nroff with either the -T37 or -Tlp options. Use -T37 (and the -f option of col) if the ultimate disposition of the output of col will be a device that can interpret half-line motions, and -Tlp otherwise.
col cannot back up more than 128 lines or handle more than 800 characters per line.
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.