Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

3
  • Thank you for the answer! It's much clearer now. For POSIX compliant tools, normally, how many characters are used for a tabstop? Commented Apr 15, 2022 at 11:23
  • 1
    @FajelaTajkiya, hmm, I'm not sure how many places it would come up in. expand (and unexpand) default to 8, but other than that, I think it mostly comes up when printing to the terminal. And that's up to the terminal settings. (I would expect full-screen editors to deal with tabs themselves, again, by configuration). But for the usual text-processing tools (awk, cut, sed, shell language functions, whatever), the tab is just a single character, mostly like space. Commented Apr 15, 2022 at 11:58
  • Thanks again for the insights! Commented Apr 15, 2022 at 11:59