Divide terminal into 5 columns

ls /tmp | pr -T5 -W$COLUMNS

Execute a command and get its results using python in Linux

import commands

result = commands.getoutput("ls")

One can use awk to get a specific column from a command output…

First column of the command
date|awk '{print $1}'

11th Column of the command
ps aux|awk '{print $11}'

Use a different Field separator
cat /etc/passwd|awk -F ':' '{print $1}'

[tags]awk,sed,shell,script,output,filter,text,cli,linux,string,separator[/tags]

Get just the first line of the output of a command…

<command>|head -n1

ls -1|head -n1