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I want to print the output of usernames from /etc/passwd into multiple columns. The output from my server is

[root@master vdabas]# cat -n /etc/passwd | cut -f1 -d":"

 1  root
 2  bin
 3  daemon
 4  adm
 5  lp
 6  sync
 7  shutdown
 8  halt
 9  mail
10  operator
11  games
12  ftp
13  nobody
14  systemd-network
15  dbus
16  polkitd
17  sshd
18  postfix
19  vdabas
20  vani
21  delhi

I want the output to be as below:

 1  root            8  halt             15  dbus
 2  bin             9  mail             16  polkitd
 3  daemon          10 operator         17  sshd
 4  adm             11 games            18  postfix
 5  lp              12 ftp              19  vdabas
 6  sync            13 nobody           20  vani
 7  shutdown        14 systemd-network  21  delhi
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2 Answers 2

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6

You can use the pr command to format in 3 columns (-3), omitting pagination (-T):

cat -n /etc/passwd | cut -f1 -d":" | pr -T -3

or perhaps

awk -F: '{print NR,$1}' /etc/passwd | pr -T -3
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0
0

Under macOS (and maybe other BSD flavors) use

 pr -t -3

(lower case "t")

In your peculiar case, if your input were in a file list.txt

pr -3 -l7 list.txt

would do the job. As said, for my BSDish macOS "pr" command. (note that the option -l automatically supresses the headers if the sum of the -l argument is not greater than the sum of both, the header and trailer depths)

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