Formatting list of Amazon EC2 instances from the command line

I retrieve data about my current Amazon EC2 instances with ec2-describe-instances -H, which returns something like the following:

Type    ReservationID   Owner   Groups  Platform
RESERVATION r-xxxxxxxx  xxxxxxxxxxxx    default
INSTANCE    i-xxxxxxxx  ami-2b5fba42    ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com ip-xx-xx-xx-xx.ec2.internal running user    0       m1.small    2011-07-12T21:15:39+0000    us-east-1a  aki-xxxxxxxx    ari-xxxxxxxx        monitoring-disabled xx.xx.xx.xx xx.xx.xx.xx         instance-store          paravirtual xen     sg-xxxxxxxx default

This looks messy in the OS X terminal. How can I make this outp开发者_JAVA百科ut more readable?

I just whipped up a little bash/awk script you might be interested in:

https://github.com/epheph/fec2din

It displays EC2 instance output in the format of:

Instance: i-57192e11
AMI: ami-a7f539ce
Type: t1.micro
Public IP: 50.99.41.60 (ec2-50-99-41-60.compute-1.amazonaws.com)
Private IP: 10.99.241.197
Public Key: production
Start Time: 2011-11-09
Security Group: production
Block Devices:
    /dev/sda1
    /dev/sdj
    /dev/sdk

What specific portions would you like to see, or view?

 ec2-describe-instances | grep INSTANCE | awk {'print $4'}

This will give you the instance name, which would be ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com in your example.

Edit

As the person asking the question said they wanted it in a cleaner format ... without specifying what that is ... here is my feeble attempt:

 #!/bin/bash

 tmpFile="/tmp/ec2.info"
 ec2Info=`ec2-describe-instances > $tmpFile`
 instances=`cat $tmpFile | grep TAG | awk {'print $3'}`
 numOfInstances=`cat $tmpFile | grep INSTANCE | wc -l`
 you=`whoami`


 echo "Dear $you, I wanted to describe for you the current number of instances you have: $numOfInstances"
 echo "The instances you have, by hostname, are as follows ..."
 for instance in $instances
 do
      hostname=`cat $tmpFile | grep INSTANCE | grep $instance | awk {' print $4 '}`
      echo "$hostname"
 done

small disclaimer the above code may not be perfect ... it's to give the person asking the question the right information to make a "clean format" however they see fit.