title: Bash Split by column printf output
body: <p>For a menu, i'm trying to split the following output with a printf. 
  Actually, the output is made on one column, the goal is to split the output into severals columns of 20 or 30 elements.</p>
  
  <p>The text file is composed with the following items nearly 100:</p>
  
  <pre><code>item1
  item2
  item3
  ...
  item98
  item99
  item100
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here the code. I tried with %-xxs without success.</p>
  
  <pre><code>LST_SRV_PSI=lst.txt
  mapfile -t HOSTTAB &lt; "$LST_SRV_PSI"
  for i in ${!HOSTTAB[@]}; do
      #printf "%3d%s) %s\n" $((i+1)) "${choices[i]:- }" "${HOSTTAB[i]}"
      printf "%3d%s) %-10s\n" $((i+1)) "${choices[i]:- }" "${HOSTTAB[i]}"
  done
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I need to split this all 100 items in severals columns:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  1 ) ITEM1
    2 ) ITEM2
    3 ) ITEM3
    4 ) ITEM4
    5 ) ITEM5
  until
   98  ) ITEM98
   99  ) ITEM99
   100 ) ITEM100
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks for any help.</p>
  
  <p>Regards,</p>