today I have discovered accidentally that column utility behaves oddly when piped to another command, as shown on example below. I am not sure whether this is a bug or intended behaviour.

First "column" built from sources (commit https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/commit/?id=94feb5a20d23904cc15cd857c4e00f35f495116c):

$ echo '_ __ ___ ________ __________ ________' | ./column -t | nl # strange

1 __

2 ___

3 ___

4 _________

5 __________

6 _______

$ echo '_ __ ___ ________ __________ ________' | ./column -t > file.txt # the same issue as above

$ echo '_ __ ___ ________ __________ ________' | ./column -t # expected
_ __ ___ ________ __________ ________

A workaround that works sometimes (on this and some other but not all inputs) is to pass -c 0 option:

$ echo '_ __ ___ ________ __________ ________' | ./column -t -c 0 | nl # expected
1 _ __ ___ ________ __________ ________

Separate binary built from parent commit 3949a48dd1351cea7c523fe97666190359247630 behaves well:

$ echo '_ __ ___ ________ __________ ________' | ./column -t | nl

1 _ __ ___ ________ __________ ________

LANG=C.UTF-8

LANGUAGE=

LC_CTYPE="C.UTF-8"

LC_NUMERIC="C.UTF-8"

LC_TIME="C.UTF-8"

LC_COLLATE="C.UTF-8"

LC_MONETARY="C.UTF-8"

LC_MESSAGES="C.UTF-8"

LC_PAPER="C.UTF-8"

LC_NAME="C.UTF-8"

LC_ADDRESS="C.UTF-8"

LC_TELEPHONE="C.UTF-8"

LC_MEASUREMENT="C.UTF-8"

LC_IDENTIFICATION="C.UTF-8"

LC_ALL=