Hi, On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 01:42:29PM +0100, Leonard Janis Robert König wrote: > I'm sorry if I this is not a bug but to be expected, but I thnk pr > doesn't get the alignment of tabs in multicolumn output right. > > Consider the following test input, where everything from x->x is a tab > (with tabs 8):
Email quoting disturbs the alignment with tabs, thus I omit those examples. > Run it through multicolumn pr, e.g., > > pr -t -2 test > out > > The output looks [garbled.] > [...] > In contrast, on a SunOS 5.10 machine, I get: > > 123456781234567812345678123456781 123456781234567812345678123456781 > x x x x x x x x This is lacking the first 'x', did you use a different input file? > Basically, SunOS pr notices, that it cannot print "\tx\tx\tx\tx" > anymore, since the separation between the pages messed that up. > Instead it prints "\t x\t x\t x\t x". You can work around the issue by using "expand" to change tabs into spaces before using "pr": $ expand test | pr -t -2 123456781234567812345678123456781 123456781234567812345678123456781 x x x x x x x x x x > [...] > This seems *kind* of related to multi-column merged > output, as was discussed some years ago here: > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-03/msg00121.html Just keeping tabs for the second column cannot always work. > [...] > What do you think? It seems to me the approach of "expand"ing the tabs to spaces before using "pr" is the most general. Thanks, Erik -- Be water, my friend. -- Bruce Lee
