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  • Oh cool, I hadn't seen that command. | column -t -s $'\t' does almost exactly what I want, except that it loses empty cells (a\t\tc apparently gets interpreted as cell a followed by cell c, instead of cell a, empty cell, cell c as I'd prefer). Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 4:14
  • The Debian version of column(1) appears to have been patched with an additional -n flag that addresses this (runs of consecutive column delimiters). If you don't have that, I've edited an alternate approach into my answer. Commented Feb 9, 2012 at 5:28
  • Excellent. Thanks for your help, @jw013. Commented Feb 11, 2012 at 7:03