Programs sometimes have multi-row/multi-line outputs with decent regularity.
You may want to "table-ify" such outputs for further processing, e.g. to do some
quick arithmetic work across columns with an awk or rp at the end of
a shell pipeline.
This can also be useful in extract-transform-load (ETL) contexts where you want to re-shape inputs to a table loading pipeline.
Sometimes it seems more natural to create multi-row outputs and then pipe them
to unfold. For example:
cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/base_frequency \
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq |
unfold -n2 | awk '{print $1/$2}' # Float arithmetic here unfold [optional-params]
Join blocks of stdin lines into one line sent to stdout.
-h, --help print this cligen-erated help
--help-syntax advanced: prepend,plurals,..
-s=, --sep= string "\t" separates the old lines within the new
-n=, --n= int 0 Join |n| lines into 1
-b=, --before= string "" join blocks beginning with a matching line
-a=, --after= string "" join blocks ending with a matching line
-i, --ignore bool false regex are case-insensitive
-e, --extended bool false regexes are nim re 'extended' syntax
There are ways to do this with awk|etc. directly, but require either state
machine-think that distracts in the heat of the analysis moment or else some
devoted awk|etc. scripts. You could think of this program as a replacement
for some such scripts (that probably runs faster than them).