column: provide support for terminal capabilities

[jsamr]

Currently, there is no way to instruct column utility to adjust width computation with terminal capabilities. Example:

$ echo -e "$(tput smul)A$(tput rmul) B\nC D"
A B
C D
$ echo -e "$(tput smul)A$(tput rmul) B\nC D" | column --table
A  B
C                 D

When provided with --term option, column could use terminfo database to adjust the computation of column width accordingly.

EDIT:

Version tested: 2.35.1-1.1
Related issue #252
Terminal emulator: urxvt, alacritty
Shell: bash 5.0.16

[jsamr]

By the way, it would be nice to have the feature consistently implemented across other utils such as fmt.

[karelzak]

It's libsmartcols bug. It uses by default calculation that assumes \x for all unprintable chars -- this feature is disabled for column(1), but libsmartcols still uses it in many places.

The problem should be fixed now.