tabs |
[-n |-a |-a2 |-c |-c2 |-c3 |-f |-p |-s |-u ]
[+m[n]] [-T type] |
tabs |
[-T type] [+[n]]
n1[,n2,...] |
The tabs
utility displays a series of characters that
first clears the hardware terminal tab settings and then initializes the tab
stops at the specified positions and optionally adjusts the margin.
The phrase "tab-stop position N" means that, from the
start of a line of output, tabbing to position N shall cause the next
character output to be in the (N+1)th column on that line.
The following options are supported:
-
n
- Specifies repetitive tab stops separated by a uniform number of columns,
n, where n is a single digit
decimal number. The default usage of
tabs
with no
arguments is equivalent to tabs
-8
. When -0
is used, the
tab stops are cleared and no new ones set.
-a
- Assembler, applicable to some mainframes. Equivalent to
tabs
1,10,16,36,72 .
-a2
- Assembler, applicable to some mainframes. Equivalent to
tabs
1,10,16,40,72
-c
- COBOL, normal format. Equivalent to
tabs
1,8,12,16,20,55
-c2
- COBOL, compact format (columns 1 to 6 omitted). Equivalent to
tabs
1,6,10,14,49
-c3
- COBOL, compact format (columns 1 to 6 omitted), with more tabs than
-c2
. Equivalent to tabs
1,6,10,14,18,22,26,30,34,38,42,46,50,54,58,62,67
-f
- FORTRAN. Equivalent to
tabs
1,7,11,15,19,23
-p
- PL/1. Equivalent to
tabs
1,5,9,13,17,21,25,29,33,37,41,45,49,53,57,61
-s
- SNOBOL. Equivalent to
tabs
1,10,55
-T
type
- Indicates the type of terminal.
-u
- Assembler, applicable to some mainframes. Equivalent to
tabs
1,12,20,44
The COLUMNS
and TERM
environment
variables affect the execution of tabs
as described in
environ(7).
The -T
option overrides
TERM
. If neither TERM
nor
the -T
option are present,
tabs
will fail.
The tabs
utility exits 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs.
The tabs
utility conforms to IEEE Std
1003.1 (“POSIX.1”).
A tabs
utility first appeared in PWB UNIX. This
implementation was introduced in NetBSD 6.0.