Text in columns (like in a table) - bash

Question

I would like to have one column with a label and a second column with a longer text inside with line breaks like in a table.
Label Text: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed
diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna
aliquyam erat, sed diam voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et
justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no
sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Lorem
ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam.
I tried:
paste label.txt long.txt | column -s $'\t'
Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

Glad you have accepted an answer. Just for others who might want to have the
text re-wrapped to avoid over-long lines, this sort of text-processing is what nroff was invented for
over 40 years ago. It's now part of the groff package. Here's an example:
(echo -e '.na\n.nh'
cat label.txt
echo "'in \\w' $(<label.txt)'u"
cat long.txt ) |
nroff | sed '/^$/d'
Nroff commands begin with . or ' at start of line.
.na stops justification, .nh stops hyphenation, 'in sets the indent
to the width of the string (\w'...'), and the sed is to remove trailing blank lines.
You can set the line width with .ll 80 eg for 80 columns.
Long live nroff!
Label Text: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing
elitr, sed diam nonumy eirmod tempor invidunt ut
labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam
voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores
et ea rebum. Stet clita kasd gubergren, no sea
takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing
elitr, sed diam.

Answer 2

The following bash script might help you:
padded-paste.sh:
#!/bin/bash
label=$1
text=$2
# get the number of lines in the text
nline=$(wc -l ${text} | cut -f 1 -d' ')
# get the width of the label
padding=$(awk 'NR==1{ print length }' ${label})
# create a temp directory
tmpdir=$(mktemp -dt "$(basename $0).XXXXXXXXXX")
templabel=${tmpdir}/label.tmp
# print the first line of the label file to a temp file:
awk 'NR==1{ print }' ${label} > ${templabel}
# add blank padding to the temp label file:
for i in $(seq 2 $nline); do
printf "%*s\n" $padding "" >> ${templabel}
done
# pasted the padded lable to the long text
paste -d' ' ${templabel} ${text}
Based on the following inputs:
label.txt:
Label Text:
long.txt:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy
eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam
voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet
clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit
amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam.
You can use it like:
sh padded-paste.sh label.txt long.txt
And it will output:
Label Text: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam nonumy
eirmod tempor invidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliquyam erat, sed diam
voluptua. At vero eos et accusam et justo duo dolores et ea rebum. Stet
clita kasd gubergren, no sea takimata sanctus est Lorem ipsum dolor sit
amet. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consetetur sadipscing elitr, sed diam.