I spend much of my time ssh’ed into a remote machine (my school’s high performance computing cluster) and often come across .csv files that I’d like to view. cat, although fast, does not handle .csv’s in any special way, and if the .csv is not short and simple, can result in unintelligible output. I was recently diving through my organization’s .bashrc and found this handy script.

function pcsv() {

cat $1 | sed -e 's/,,/, ,/g' | column -s, -t | less -#5 -N -S

}

which results in some pretty nicely formatted output.

Thanks to whichever fed up grad student that wrote this.