Hi, On Wed, 2021-02-10 at 16:44 +0100, Erik Auerswald wrote: > Hi, > > On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 01:42:29PM +0100, Leonard Janis Robert König > wrote: > > I'm sorry if I this is not a bug but to be expected, but I thnk pr > > doesn't get the alignment of tabs in multicolumn output right. > > > > Consider the following test input, where everything from x->x is a > > tab > > (with tabs 8): > > Email quoting disturbs the alignment with tabs, thus I omit those > examples. > > > Run it through multicolumn pr, e.g., > > > > pr -t -2 test > out > > > > The output looks [garbled.] > > [...] > > In contrast, on a SunOS 5.10 machine, I get: > > > > 123456781234567812345678123456781 > > 123456781234567812345678123456781 > > x x x x x x x > > x > > This is lacking the first 'x', did you use a different input file?
Yes, my bad, I toyed around a bit. The result, with the same input file, is as I described: 123456781234567812345678123456781 123456781234567812345678123456781 x x x x x x x x x x > > > Basically, SunOS pr notices, that it cannot print "\tx\tx\tx\tx" > > anymore, since the separation between the pages messed that up. > > Instead it prints "\t x\t x\t x\t x". > > You can work around the issue by using "expand" to change tabs into > spaces before using "pr": > > $ expand test | pr -t -2 > 123456781234567812345678123456781 123456781234567812345678123456781 > x x x x x x x x x x > > > [...] > > This seems *kind* of related to multi-column merged > > output, as was discussed some years ago here: > > > > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-03/msg00121.html > > Just keeping tabs for the second column cannot always work. But that seems to be what GNU pr tries to do. > > [...] > > What do you think? > > It seems to me the approach of "expand"ing the tabs to spaces before > using > "pr" is the most general It is indeed the most general approach, but this would be quite a caveat for anyone who prints tabbed source code in a multicolumn format, where the columns do not happen to be starting at n*8 characters. I could confirm that FreeBSD does mirror the SunOS behavior as well. ~ leo