Re: Enhancement suggestion for "expand"

[Pádraig Brady]

On 09/18/2012 03:18 PM, CoreUtils subscribtion for PLC wrote:
> Hi
>
> This post is about a possible enhancement to the "expand" command included in 
> coreutils.
>
> I oten use expand to format scripts output by manually setting tabs stop. The idea would be to 
> add an option to "expand" to be able to auto-set tabstops by analyzing first 
> <n> lines of test (0 for analyzing whole stream) so that the TS would be set to the 
> minimum number of spaces to obtains clean columns.
>
> Best regards
>
> plc

So for input with just leading tabs, they would be expanded to a single space,
but in the presence of both leading tabs and spaces, the tab width would
be set to the minimum such that non blanks only start at a tab stop.

Interesting idea, though not very useful I would expect,
since you'd probably have to specify a minimum with the --tabs option,
at which stage you don't have much advantage over just setting --tabs directly.

thanks,
Pádraig.