Using sed to print content of files in columns - shell

Question

I have an file , my file name is lookup.txt. Sometimes this file content is 100 lines , so everything scroll while printing. Thats why i like to print it on screen in 2 or more columns.
my bash doesnt support commands like pr or columns.Need to be in old fashion shell.
Content of lookup file is:
1-Top Scores
2-Last Scores
3-Username
4-Birthday
5-Last Meal today
6-Coronavirus in Italy
7-Lets Stay Home
8-Winner
9-Germany and Belgium
10-Alfa
11-Bravo
12-Charlie and delta
For printing in columns i use this command found here on stackoverflow:
cat lookup.txt | xargs printf '%-24s\n' | sed '$p;N;s/\n//;$p;N;s/\n//'
and this is the print in columns:
1-Top Scores 2-Last
Scores 3-Username 4-Birthday
5-Last Meal today
6-Coronavirus in Italy
7-Lets Stay Home
8-Winner 9-Germany and
Belgium 10-Alfa 11-Bravo
12-Charlie and delta
What i need is to let sed not split the words into different columns but just the line.
1-Top Scores 6-Coronavirus in Italy 11-Bravo
2-Last Scores 7-Lets Stay Home 12-Charlie and delta
3-Username 8-Winner
4-Birthday 9-Germany and Belgium
5-Last Meal today 10-Alfa
if the 3 columns are to width then x chars then print in 2 columns (this last is optional)
thanks in advance
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root#xp1000max:~#

Answer 1

Not claiming complete credit, you can modify this andlrc's answer on In bash how can I split a column in several column of fixed dimension to your requirement.
Instead of appending the columns with a whitespace, you can use sprintf() to custom print your column strings. Tested on GNU awk
awk '
BEGIN {
# Numbers of rows to print
n=5;
}
{
# Add to array with key = 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 0, 1, 2, ..
l[(NR-1)%n] = sprintf("%s%-24s", l[(NR-1)%n], $0)
};
END {
# print the array
for (i = 0; i < length(l); i++) {
print l[i];
}
}
' file

Answer 2

Try this:
cat lookup.txt | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 -n 2 printf '%-24s %-24s\n'
The tr command will convert newlines to nul chars.
Then we tell xargs to take nul-separated args and pass two at a time to the command.