How to expand tabs? Where is expand program.

[Warren Young]

On Jul 2, 2015, at 5:14 PM, Richard Heintze <sieg_heintze@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> There used to be a very handy cygwin program called expand for expanding tabs into spaces. 

expand(1) goes way, way back before Cygwin.  Not as far back as V7 Unix.  Maybe 4.3BSD?

> I tried searching the archives for it but there were too many hits for other topics ("expand" is a common word, apparently). 

The proper way to search for such a thing is to put “expand.exe” into the Cygwin Package Search:

    https://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-grep.cgi?grep=expand.exe&arch=x86_64

It tells you it’s in coreutils.

That’s in Base, so if that didn’t get installed, or expand.exe got removed afterward, your Cygwin installation may be broken.  I’d force a reinstall of coreutils, and maybe everything else in Base, too.

> Has it been taken away? I hope not!

It pretty much can’t be taken away; it’s required by POSIX:

    http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/expand.html

> How can I get a command line interface for expanding tabs into spaces that I can easily use from VI?

You don’t have to, actually.  Say :set expandtab.  Now you don’t need expand(1) at all. :)

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