Bash --- columns problem ??

[Steven W. Orr]

On Saturday, Dec 15th 2007 at 05:52 -0000, quoth William Case:

=>Hi;
=>
=>I am having a bit of a brain cramp.
=>
=>I have a text file with 1100 one word lines in it.  I would like to
=>transpose that file into a three column text file reducing it from 23
=>pages to 8 pages before printing.  I did something similar from the
=>command line over a year ago, but for the life of me I can't remember
=>how.  I do remember that it was simple at the time.
=>
=>I have tried every possible combination I can think of with grep |
=>column.
=>
=>If this problem is familiar to someone could they just point me; tickle
=>my memory?

Why use grep or pr or any other shellout when you can just do it right 
from within bash?

myRead()
{
    typeset line1, line2, line3
    read line1
    read line2
    read line3
    echo "$line1 $line2 $line3"
    [[ -n "$line1" && -n "$line2" && -n "$line3" ]]
}
while myRead
do
    :
done < /usr/share/dict/words 

-- 
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steveo at syslang.net