lineup

#!/bin/bash

# assumptions: there are no hard tabs in the input

sed -e 's/   */\t/g' | column -s$'\t' -t -o$'\t' | sed -e 's/\t/ \t/g' | expand -4

: <<EOF

Q:  Why all this extra effort instead of just "column -t"?

A:  I use this to line up things where the cell value itself may have spaces,
    so I can't use a single space as a delimiter -- too many words that should
    be *within* a cell would be split into columns!

    So this uses two (or more) spaces as a delimiter.  Also, it maintains at
    least 2 spaces in the output, so that the whole thing is idempotent.

    (As a bonus, things are lined up on tabstop 4 boundaries, which I
    personally happen to prefer over 2 or 8).

EOF