I've noticed long time ago that the display of the tab char was wrong on the first line of the output, and only on the first line. E.g.,

$ jot 3 | cat -n
     1     1
     2  2
     3  3

Today I notice it *only* happens in my login shell. So I did a diff on the 'stty -a' output, and found is reason is tab3

So I change it to tab0, which is normal value and the problem solved.

stty tab0

Look into the .profile, I found that this is cause by the stty -tabs. Change it to 'stty tab0' completely solved the problem.

documented on: 2001.04.14 Sat 21:58:59