What command can be used for replacing the tab character with
spaces? Where the number of spaces is equivalent to the number of
spaces in a tab. I've tried expand, but this doesn't seem to work.
I also tried using tr a while ago, but when I tried to compile fortran
code the tab characters are not removed. Perhaps I am not using tr
correctly. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thank You

col -x should do the trick:

$ /bin/echo a\\tb|od -c
0000000 a \t b \n
0000004
$ /bin/echo a\\tb|col -x|od -c
0000000 a b \n
0000012

Regards
Joachim Gann

On 10 Apr., 14:58, David Groff <david.gr...@noaa.gov> wrote:
> What command can be used for replacing the tab character with
> spaces? Where the number of spaces is equivalent to the number of
> spaces in a tab. I've tried expand, but this doesn't seem to work.
> I also tried using tr a while ago, but when I tried to compile fortran
> code the tab characters are not removed. Perhaps I am not using tr
> correctly. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> Thank You

On Tue, 10 Apr 2007 08:58:47 -0400, David Groff wrote:

> What command can be used for replacing the tab character with spaces?
> Where the number of spaces is equivalent to the number of spaces in a tab.
> I've tried expand, but this doesn't seem to work. I also tried using tr a
> while ago, but when I tried to compile fortran code the tab characters are
> not removed. Perhaps I am not using tr correctly. Any suggestions would be
> appreciated. Thank You

Expand should work. What's going wrong when you try it? What AIX version
and manintenance level do you have?

I don't think tr will do what you want, it replaces characters with single
characters, not strings.

Sed should do: sed -e "s/<tab>/<however many spaces>/g" - except that this
will replace each tab with the same number of spaces, it won't column
align.

Also there's untab but it doesn't do anything expand won't and is not very
flexible (e.g. tab size fixed at 8 spaces).

Regards, Ian