z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command ... - Christian Grothoff

Description
Options
Localization
col processes control characters for vertical line feeds and writes the processed
text to the standard output. It is intended to be used as a filter between a program
such as nroff and an output device that cannot handle reverse line feeds.
Where possible, blank characters (spaces) are converted to tabs; tab stops are
assumed to be every eight characters.
col also removes all escape sequences except for those shown in the following list.
ESC is the ASCII escape character, octal code 033.
Character ASCII Control Character
Backspace 010
Carriage-return
015
Newline 012
Vertical Tab 013
SO 016
SI 017
Space 040
Tab 011
Reverse line feed
ESC-7
Reverse half-line feed
ESC-8
Forward half-line feed
ESC-9
The ASCII control characters SO and SI denote the beginning and end of text in an
alternative character set. The set of each input character is remembered. col
generates SO and SI characters as needed to output each character in the correct
character set.
–b Ignores backspace (CRTL-H) characters. If two characters are supposed to
appear in the same space, the first character is ignored and the second is
output.
–f Allows forward half-line motions. Normally these are changed to forward
full-line motions.
–x Prevents conversion of spaces to tab characters.
col uses the following localization environment variables:
v LANG
v LC_ALL
v LC_CTYPE
v LC_MESSAGES
v NLSPATH
col
Chapter 2. Shell command descriptions 139