rs(1) prints all output in a single line; how to duplicate the input array shape?

Question

Consider this usage of rs(1):

rs -n -z -c, <<CSV
a,b,c
dd,ee,ff
CSV

The above snippet emits:

a  b  c  dd  ee  ff

But I was expecting to see something like this:

a   b   c
dd  ee  ff

The manual suggests that the output array shape should match the input array shape unless configured otherwise.

rs -h using the same input emits 2 3, which suggests that rs does correctly identify the input array shape.

What am I misunderstanding in the usage of rs? Is there a way to have it automatically format the output with the same shape as the input?

Answer 1

column does not behave as expected with leading empty fields. You might want this

awk 'BEGIN {FS = ","; OFS = "\t"} {$1 = $1} 1' <<DATA
a,b,c
,x,y
dd,ee,ff
DATA

a   b   c
    x   y
dd  ee  ff