OSXFAQ Mac OS X UNIX Tip-of-the-Day 

We can take advantage of a very useful feature of printf to print tables of data. Check this example:

$ printf "<tr>\n  <td>%s</td>  <td>%s>/td>\n</tr>\n" Apples 7 Pineapples 5 Pears 6
<tr>
  <td>Apples</td>  <td>7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td>Pineapples</td>  <td>5</td>
</tr>
<tr>
  <td>Pears</td>  <td>6</td>
</tr>
$ 

The printf statement prints what's in its format string. %s tells printf to look outside the format string for a value to substitute. Because the format string has two occurrences of %s, but we supply six values, it takes three sweeps at the string.

Using the next trick, we can read the values from a file.

$ echo "Apples 7 Pineapples 5 Pears 6" > fruit-count
$ printf "<tr>  <td> %s</td>  <td>%s</td>\n</tr>\n" $(cat fruit-count)
<tr>
  <td>Apples</td>  <td>7</td>
...