Consider the following data where the columns are separated by a tab character. However, since the field length in each column changes across rows, it looks really messy if the file is just catted out.

% cat data3.txt
clue	answer
Cotillion honorees	debs
Contend	vie
Conductor	Maestro

A better way to print it is to use the “column” command from the bsdextrautils package.

% cat data3.txt | column -ts $'\t'
clue                answer
Cotillion honorees  debs
Contend             vie
Conductor           Maestro

Tested this on a machine running Debian stable (Bookworm) using

% cat /etc/debian_version 
12.0

% zsh --version
zsh 5.9 (x86_64-debian-linux-gnu)

% which column
/usr/bin/column

% dpkg -S /usr/bin/column
bsdextrautils: /usr/bin/column

% dpkg -l bsdextrautils | grep ^ii
ii  bsdextrautils  2.38.1-5+b1  amd64        extra utilities from 4.4BSD-Lite