One of the most useful little tools for information parsing that I’ve used has to be awk. Specifically, awk will allow you to pipe text through it and use the printf() function to format text as you require it to be formatted. It also has a basic scripting language that lends further functionality, making it an ubiquitous tool in the POSIX arsenal. Need to format a list of US States for a Maruku table? Not a problem. Copy / Paste it into a text file and pipe it through this: