View tabular file such as CSV from command line

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Anyone know of a command-line CSV viewer for Linux/OS X? I'm thinking of something like less but that spaces out the columns in a more readable way. (I'd be fine with opening it with OpenOffice Calc or Excel, but that's way too overpowered for just looking at the data like I need to.) Having horizontal and vertical scrolling would be great.

18 Answers

Tabview is really good. Worked with 200+MB files that displayed nicely which were buggy with LibreOffice as well as csv plugin in gvim.

The Anaconda version is available here: https://anaconda.org/bioconda/tabview

There's this short command line script in python: https://github.com/rgrp/csv2ascii/blob/master/csv2ascii.py

Just download and place in your path. Usage is like

csv2ascii.py [options] csv-file-path

Convert csv file at csv-file-path to ascii form returning the result on stdout. If csv-file-path = '-' then read from stdin.

Options:

  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -w WIDTH, --width=WIDTH
                        Width of ascii output
  -c COLUMNS, --columns=COLUMNS
                        Only display this number of columns
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