Text Format Converting


Table of Contents

cmd:expand - convert tabs to spaces 
help 
cmd:od 
misc commands 
cmd:recode 
European chars to ascii 
fixing .txt files sent from a MS$ user 
PC graphics characters 
ASCII art 
ANSI art 
ANSI art 
UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1 tool 
UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1 tool 
UTF-8 to ISO 8859-1 tool 
European chars to ascii 
European chars to ascii 
Need help converting files to unix format 
cmd:AutoConvert 
Usage 
cmd:AutoConvert 
Description 
Source 
Related Urls 

cmd:expand - convert tabs to spaces 

$ expand  -4
aa     ssss
aa  ssss

help 

expand - convert tabs to spaces

Synopsis 

expand [-tab1[,tab2[,...]]] [-t tab1[,tab2[,...]]] [-i] [--tabs=tab1[,tab2[,...]]] [--initial] [--help] [--version] [file...]

Description 

This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be inaccurate or incomplete. The Texinfo documentation is now the authoritative source.

This manual page documents the GNU version of expand. expand writes the contents of each given file, or the standard input if none are given or when a file named `-' is given, to the standard output, with tab characters converted to the appropriate number of spaces. By default, expand converts all tabs to spaces. It preserves backspace characters in the output; they decrement the column count for tab calculations. The default action is equivalent to -8 (set tabs every 8 columns).

Options 

-, -t, --tabs tab1[,tab2[,...]]
If only one tab stop is given, set the tabs tab1 spaces apart
instead of the default 8. Otherwise, set the tabs at columns tab1,
tab2, etc. (numbered from 0) and replace any tabs beyond the
tabstops given with single spaces. If the tabstops are specified
with the -t or --tabs option, they can be separated by blanks as
well as by commas.

documented on: 1999.11.26