Grep, Awk and Sed

Grep, awk and sed are small UNIX tools for simple matching and reformatting of text lines. Grep matches regular expressions; awk is a simple programming languages (it precedes perl); sed is a stream editor.

Table Formatting
The output of  is formatted as follows:

adns                          @1.4            net/adns apache24-devel                @2.4.7          www/apache24-devel apr                           @1.4.8          devel/apr apr-util                      @1.5.2          devel/apr-util ...

To sort based on category, reformat with awk and sort:

% port list active | awk '{print $3,$1}' | sort | awk '{printf " %-30s %s\n",$2,$1}' aquaterm                      aqua/aquaterm bzip2                         archivers/bzip2 gzip                          archivers/gzip lzo2                          archivers/lzo2 p7zip                         archivers/p7zip ...