EXPAND(1) | General Commands Manual | EXPAND(1) |
expand
, unexpand
— expand tabs to spaces, and vice versa
expand |
[-t
tab1,tab2,...,tabn]
[file ...] |
unexpand |
[-a | -t
tab1,tab2,...,tabn]
[file ...] |
The expand
utility processes the named
files or the standard input writing the standard output with tabs changed
into blanks. Backspace characters are preserved into the output and
decrement the column count for tab calculations. The
expand
utility is useful for pre-processing
character files (before sorting, looking at specific columns, etc.) that
contain tabs.
The unexpand
utility puts tabs back into
the data from the standard input or the named files and writes the result on
the standard output.
The following options are available:
-a
unexpand
only.) By default, only leading blanks
and tabs are reconverted to maximal strings of tabs. If the
-a
option is given, then tabs are inserted
whenever they would compress the resultant file by replacing two or more
characters.-t
-Sm
tab1,
tab2, ..., tabn
SmThe LANG
, LC_ALL
and LC_CTYPE
environment variables affect the
execution of expand
and
unexpand
as described in
environ(7).
The expand
and
unexpand
utilities exit 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs.
The expand
and
unexpand
utilities conform to IEEE
Std 1003.1-2001 (“POSIX.1”).
The expand
utility first appeared in
1BSD.
June 6, 2015 | macOS 14.6 |