Re: expand: not found

[Roger M. Burkhart]

> We having problems trying to compile swarm libraries, as we
> are getting hundreds of
> "expand: not found"
> errors.  We are using SGI Indys.  "expand" is not in our
> /usr/bin or /usr/sbin directories.  Can anyone tell us
> what we are doing wrong?  I am sure it is somehitng simple
> we are overlooking.

I'm not sure about hundreds of messages, but I know where at least
a few could come from.  The expand command is being used internally
by a script called make-h2x, which is used so far to compile the
defobj, collections, and activity libraries.  expand is a normal Unix
command (so I've always thought) I expected to be on all Unix systems.
All it does is expand tabs to spaces; if it's not on your system you
could probably get source from gnu or somewhere.

As it turns out, though, the only reason I was using expand was to
avoid cluttering up sed scripts with hard tab characters imbedded inside
commands.  But by putting them back in I can get rid of the expand
command usage, and probably speed things up as well.

I'll mail you an updated version of the make-h2x command (which goes
into the src/defobj directory) which you can try and see if this was the
only use of expand you're hitting.  If so, we'll switch to this version in
future releases.

Roger Burkhart