How to expand tabs? Where is expand program.

Fri Jul 3 00:46:00 GMT 2015

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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