sed Tab to Space - Shell/Bash

Introduction

When working with text files or shell scripts, it is sometimes necessary to replace tabs with spaces. sed command can be used for this purpose. In this tutorial, we will see how to use sed command to convert tabs to spaces.

Prerequisites

• Basic knowledge of sed command
• Access to a terminal window/command line interface

Syntax

The basic syntax for replacing tabs with spaces is as follows:

sed 's/\t/ /g' inputfile > outputfile

where:

• s - indicates that we want to substitute a pattern
• /\t/ - the pattern we want to substitute. \t represents tab
• / / - the replacement for the pattern. A space character.
• g - This flag indicates that we want to search and replace all occurrences of tab

Example

Let's say we have a file example.txt with the following content:

Hello    World
Welcome	    to
Stack    Overflow

To convert tabs to spaces in this file, we can run the following command:

sed 's/\t/ /g' example.txt > newfile.txt

This will replace all tabs with spaces and write the output to a new file newfile.txt. The new file will have the following content:

Hello World
Welcome to
Stack Overflow

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have seen how to replace tabs with spaces using the sed command. This can be a useful technique when working with text files or shell scripts.