using tr utility

[Sharvil Desai]

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 :-)

[Sharvil Desai]

:-) 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!

[Stuart Browne · Accepted solution]

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' :)

[Sharvil Desai]

Thanks for additional useful info.

[Graham Cameron_1]

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

[Sharvil Desai]

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