How to expand tabs? Where is expand program.

[Warren Young]

On Jul 2, 2015, at 6:46 PM, Warren Young <wyml@etr-usa.com> wrote:
> 
> expand(1) goes way, way back before Cygwin.  Not as far back as V7 Unix.  Maybe 4.3BSD?

I did some research, and it turns out that that’s all wrong. :)

According to the FreeBSD/Mac OS X man pages, expand(1) was first introduced in 3BSD (1978), which would put it a bit earlier than the public release of UNIX V7 (1979).

Although V7 did bring some stuff over from BSD — most notably vi — and the borrowings continued until the Great Reunification in SVR4, I can’t find a manual reference to expand(1) in any AT&T Unix, not even the Research branches.

As far as I can tell, expand(1) wasn’t standardized until 1997 as part of SUSv2:

  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/expand.html

Weird.

That also means the comment about “before Cygwin” is wrong, since that first appeared in 1995, before SUSv2.  The Cygwin Time Machine doesn’t have any pre-1997 releases of Cygwin, but I did find a 1996 tarball of GNU textutils, and it has expand(1), so it is highly likely that Cygwin had expand(1) before SUSv2 came out.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  So sad. :)
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