1COL(1) General Commands Manual COL(1)
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6 col - filter reverse line feeds
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9 col [ -bfh ]
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12 Col reads the standard input and writes the standard output. It per‐
13 forms the line overlays implied by reverse line feeds (ESC-7 in ASCII)
14 and by forward and reverse half line feeds (ESC-9 and ESC-8). Col is
15 particularly useful for filtering multicolumn output made with the
16 `.rt' command of nroff and output resulting from use of the tbl(1) pre‐
17 processor.
18 Although col accepts half line motions in its input, it normally does
20 not emit them on output. Instead, text that would appear between lines
21 is moved to the next lower full line boundary. This treatment can be
22 suppressed by the -f (fine) option; in this case the output from col
23 may contain forward half line feeds (ESC-9), but will still never con‐
24 tain either kind of reverse line motion.
25 If the -b option is given, col assumes that the output device in use is
27 not capable of backspacing. In this case, if several characters are to
28 appear in the same place, only the last one read will be taken.
29 The control characters SO (ASCII code 017), and SI (016) are assumed to
31 start and end text in an alternate character set. The character set
32 (primary or alternate) associated with each printing character read is
33 remembered; on output, SO and SI characters are generated where neces‐
34 sary to maintain the correct treatment of each character.
35 If the -h option is given, col converts white space to tabs to shorten
37 printing time.
38 All control characters are removed from the input except space,
40 backspace, tab, return, newline, ESC (033) followed by one of 7, 8, 9,
41 SI, SO, and VT (013). This last character is an alternate form of full
42 reverse line feed, for compatibility with some other hardware conven‐
43 tions. All other non-printing characters are ignored.
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46 troff(1), tbl(1)
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49 Can't back up more than 128 lines.
50 No more than 800 characters, including backspaces, on a line.
517th Edition May 16, 1986 COL(1)