col
Normalize and clean terminal text by filtering control characters, overstrikes, and formatting artifacts from man pages and troff output.
Dump a manual page to stdout
man ls | col
Strip backspaces from a manual page
man bash | col -b
Clean overstrikes from formatted text
nroff -man file.1 | col -b
Convert man output for plain text viewing
man grep | col -bx
Remove reverse line feeds from output
somecommand | col -f
Preserve form feeds when cleaning output
man awk | col -p
Clean pager output before redirecting to a file
man find | col -b > find.txt
Prepare terminal output for email or logging
script -q -c "man ssh" /dev/null | col -b
Normalize text with mixed control characters
cat raw_output.txt | col -bx
Post-process troff output for readability
groff -man page.1 | col -b
Copy manual to clipboard with xsel
man ls | xsel --clipboard