On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 7:09 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > The unix tradition is to let the TTY interpret the TABs. Utilities such > as "ed", "cat", "diff" or "gcc" don't interpret or process TABs in any > way but simply output them together with the rest of the text.
Not quite; tools like diff that put a character at the beginning of the line are likely to be tab-aware, and gcc is certainly going to comprehend them (at least to the extent of treating them as whitespace). And I think less takes notice of them, too, so it's only the very simplest tools like cat that actually ignore them or treat them as single characters (or even bytes). ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
