topic using tr utility in Operating System - Linux

using tr utility

Sharvil Desai — Mon, 05 Aug 2002 19:53:39 GMT

Hi,
I need to replace all tab characters in the file with a single space. How do I do it?
I tried,
tr -s "/t" " " I know this isn't right, can someone please tell me how to accomplish this? Thank you :-)

Re: using tr utility

Sharvil Desai — Mon, 05 Aug 2002 19:57:58 GMT

:-) Never mind it works now!
I used "\t" and it did what I needed it to do. However, it is hard to differentiate tabs and whitespaces. Is there any easy way to look at the file and determine whether the blank space is a tab or multiple whitespaces? Thank you!

Re: using tr utility

Stuart Browne — Mon, 05 Aug 2002 21:49:32 GMT

You could always try 'cat -t ', to show Tab characters as '^I'.

If using Vi, you can use the command ':set list'.

Failing either of those, you've always get 'hexdump' :)

Re: using tr utility

Sharvil Desai — Thu, 09 Oct 2003 16:36:31 GMT

Thanks for additional useful info.

Re: using tr utility

Graham Cameron_1 — Fri, 10 Oct 2003 09:46:31 GMT

Sharvil
I know you're sorted now but you may like to look at the "expand" command, which is specifically to remove tabs.
--
expand -t 1 view.txt will do what you want.
--
-- Graham

Re: using tr utility

Sharvil Desai — Fri, 10 Oct 2003 09:50:17 GMT

Great! I learned something new! Thnx for your feedback, Graham!