tabs — Set tab stops

Description

tabs sends a series of characters to the standard output, designed to clear the terminal hardware's tab stops and then set new ones. The characters that are sent depend on the type of terminal you are using.

The first column of your terminal screen is column 1. If you set a tab stop at position N and then tab to that position, the next character displayed on the screen appears in column N+1 of the line (that is, after the tab stop).

tabs may not be able to set the tab stops on some types of terminals. In this situation, it issues an error message and then exits with a status greater than zero. tabs with no arguments sets tab stops every 8 positions.

Options

+m[margin]

Sets the left margin to margin. It defaults to 10 if you do not specify a value. All tab positions are relative to the left margin. To find the actual tab positions, you add the value of margin to each tab position.

–T type

Indicates the type of terminal you have. The term argument is a site-specific name for your terminal type.

If you do not specify –T, tabs looks for an environment variable named TERM and uses its value for type. If TERM is not defined, tabs assumes a default terminal type.

–t tablist

Sets tab stops as specified by tablist. tablist consists of one or more positive decimal integers, separated by commas; the numbers in the list should be in strictly increasing order.

If only one number N is given, tabs are set every N columns. If more than one number is given, tabs are set at those column numbers.

num1[,num2,…]

Sets tab stops to the given numbers. The numbers in the list should be positive decimal integers in strictly increasing order. Except for the first number, any number in the list may be preceded by a plus sign (+), in which case the number is considered to be an increment on the previous setting rather than a column position. For example,

tabs 4,8,12
tabs 4,+4,+4

are equivalent.

tabspec

Can be one of –a, –a2, –c, –c2, –c3, –f, –p, –s or –u and sets tab stops at these positions:

–a

1,10,16,36,72

–a2

1,10,16,40,72

–c

1,8,12,16,20,55

–c2

1,6,10,14,49

–c3

1,6,10,14,18,22,26,30,34,38,42,46,50,54,58,62,67

–f

1,7,11,15,19,23

–p

1,5,9,13,17,21,25,29,33,37,41,45,49,53,57,61

–s

1,10,55

–u

1,12,20,44

Each tabspec is designed for a particular programming language. Assembler uses –a,–a2, and –u. COBOL uses –c, –c2, and –c3. FORTRAN, PL/I, and SNOBOL use –f, –p, and –s, respectively.

–number

Sets tab stops every number positions along the line. number must be a single-digit decimal number. If number is zero (–0), tabs clears all the tab stops and does not set new ones.

Environment variables

Localization

See Localization for more information.

Exit values

0

Successful completion

1

Missing definition in the terminfo database

2

Usage error

3

Unknown terminal or cannot find the terminfo database

4

Illegal tabs

5

An error occurred

Related information

stty