Turning text into two-column format and

Question

I want to read a long text file in two columns on my terminal. This means that the columns should be page oriented, so that the text at the bottom of the first column continues at the top of the second column, but the text at the bottom of the second column continues at the beginning of the first column after the page - down.

I tried columnand lessget this result, but no luck. If I pass the text in column, it creates two columns, but truncates the text before it reaches the end of the file. And if I output the output columnto less, it also returns to a single column.

a2ps does what I want in the way of reformatting, but I would prefer the output in pure form, read from the terminal, and not in the PostScript file, which I will need to read in a PDF reader.

Answer 1

You can use prfor this, for example.

ls /usr/src/linux/drivers/char/ | pr -2 |less