On 26/01/17 04:29, L A Walsh wrote: > > In programs that take tabstops, as an alternative to a tabsize, I've always > seen tabs beyond the end of the list taken as equal to the highest tab-stop > difference. So for a tabsize=8, a tabset of 1,9 would be equivalent -- with > tabs above "9" being "9-1" or every 8th column above 9. > > Otherwise you have no way of expression all tabs on a line that > stretches out to > "???" 160? 240? what? other than to enumerate tabstops to infinity. > > If they want to limit tabstops above the last to size "1", they can use > something like 1,9,10. How else can one specify tabs beyond the last > for a size other than "1"? > > Could this be changed/fixed?
This is a fair point: $ seq 8 | paste -s -d'\t' | expand --tabs=1,9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Though changing that would break backwards compat, and expand is documented in texinfo as doing exactly as above. Moreover POSIX specifies exactly this operation: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/expand.html So we'd have to use an extension to do this. Perhaps something like: expand --tabs=1,9,... cheers, Pádraig
