I have a .tsv file (values separated by tabs) with four values. So each line should have only three tabs and some text around each tab like this: value value2 value3 value4 But it looks that some lines are broken (there is more than three tabs). I need to find out these lines. --- I came up with following grep pattern. grep -v "^[^\t]+\t[^\t]+\t[^\t]+\t[^\t]+$" My thinking: - first ^ matches the beggining - [^\t]+ matches more than one "no tab character" - \t matches single tab character - $ matches end And than I just put it into right order with correct number of times. That should match correct lines. So I reverted it by -v option to get the wrong lines. But with the -v option it matches any line in the file and also some random text I tried that don't have any tabs inside. **What is my mistake please?** EDIT: I am using debian and bash.

I have input containing ANSI color codes that I'd like to tablify. I want the output to remain colored, so the tablified output should maintain the ANSI color codes. Hence, naively stripping them away does not meet my requirements. For example, for this input, \033[0;32;1mgreen_apple\033[0m 1 100 orange 20 19 pineapple 1000 87 avocado 4 30 The output I expect would be similar to green_apple 1 100 orange 20 19 pineapple 1000 87 avocado 4 30 In the above output, "green_apple" should be colored according to the color codes from the input i.e. green. I'd like to know how this can be accomplished. I've tried column, but it doesn't handle ANSI codes. The output of echo '\033[0;32;1mgreen_apple\033[0m 1 100 orange 20 19 pineapple 1000 87 avocado 4 30' | column -t is unfortunately green_apple 1 100 orange 20 19 pineapple 1000 87 avocado 4 30 Notice the non-tablification.

I use expand to expand tabs to spaces. For utf8 files expand doesn't work correctly. E.g. in ć\ta tab is expanded to 6 spaces while in a\ta to 7 spaces. How do I make it work for utf8 files?

Sometimes, I'm getting as an input tab separated list, which is not quite aligned, for instance var1 var2 var3 var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3 Is there an easy way to render them aligned? var1 var2 var3 var_with_long_name_which_ruins_alignment var2 var3

I tried to change all the indentation settings to fix another problem yesterday, but now I have the following problem and I don't know which setting causes it. If I select lines and type Tab, I would expect the selected lines to be indented. Instead, the selection is replaced with a tabulation. For example, I start with: aa bb cc Then I select a part (what's between [ and ] is the selected part): aa b[b c]c Then I press Tab (---> represents a tabulation), I expect this: aa --->bb --->cc But I get this instead: aa b--->c How can I revert this behaviour? I'm using Kate 21.12.3.

My goal is to set Kate up to work properly on Python files but to use different settings (tabs not spaces) on other documents. I'm sure others are doing this, but I can't figure out a convenient solution. I appreciate any advice. Kate has settings for indentation here: 1. Click the Settings menu 2. Click "Configure - Kate" 3. On the right expand "Editor" 4. Click "Indentation" One option is "Default indentation mode". One choice for that setting is Python. However, I cannot find where to set (or even display) the options used for the Python choice. Furthermore, it is not clear what is the interaction between "Default indentation mode" and the explicit settings for indentation on that page. Does one override the other?

While ssh-ing into my server I want to be able to monitor for activity over certain port using netstat. Instead of running it manually I want to automate it with watch. While the command (sudo netstat -apon | grep 44002) running by itself gives the right output tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:44002 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1750/sshd: mainuser off (0.00/0/0) tcp6 0 0 ::1:44002 :::* LISTEN 1750/sshd: mainuser off (0.00/0/0) when combined with watch the output gets garbled looking roughly like: tcp 0 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1 c2-user off (0.00/0/0) tcp6 c2-user off (0.00/0/0) 0 ::1:44002 I suspect this has something to do with the witdh of the terminal not being handled properly. How can I fix this?

I'm looking for all tabs between two quotation marks with grep / egrep in a bash. I tried grep -r . -e "\".*\t.*\"" grep -r . -e "\".*\\t.*\"" grep -r . -e "\".*\\\\t.*\"" grep -r . -e '\".*\t.*\"' grep -r . -e '\".*\\t.*\"' grep -r . -e '".*\t.*"' grep -r . -e '".*\\t.*"' But I don't get the desired result. Following greps yield all line with a \t: grep -r . -e "\".*\\\\t.*\"" grep -r . -e '\".*\\t.*\"' grep -r . -e '".*\\t.*"' Following greps yield all line with a t: grep -r . -e "\".*\t.*\"" grep -r . -e "\".*\\t.*\"" grep -r . -e '".*\t.*"' grep -r . -e '\".*\t.*\"' But none of these searches for a real tabulator. What I'm doing wrong?

In this command : cut -f2 -d$'\t' ('\t') what is it mean ? i saw it another question, i got the idea about "tab" delimiter but still want to know '\t' shortcut or sign or command for something How to define 'tab' delimiter with 'cut' in BASH

I can resolve this problem, but I don't understand why it happens. My task is: (in ksh) - 1st step: Query a number from a DB with sqlplus, - 2nd step: Format some text for a mail, - 3rd step: send a mail with these. This is a part of my code: psnr() { sqlplus -s USR/PASS@PROD $MAILTMP if I want to use this variable *MAILTMP* I must use tr -d '\040\011' what I found here, in stackexchange, 'cause the result without tr will be this: od -c mailtmp.17872.txt 0000000 T o d a y ' s r e s u l t i 0000020 s : \t 1 2 3 4 5 0000040 6 7 \n 0000043 That tab '\t' is what I don't understand: where does it come from, from sqlplus? Possibly DB specificity? (I checked in TOAD, both coloumns are number(18). Maybe the function in ksh have some special features?

I'd like to tabularize a file with the column command: $ column -c 60 file.txt The output is nice on the screen, but unusable for my purposes because the items are seperated by tabs. for further processing, I need them as whitespace. Of course, I cannot just replace one tab with one space because this would destroy the left-alignment of the 2nd, 3rd etc column.

I've already read some explananations about unexpand, but either I don't understand, or is not working as expected. Let's consider the following example: [root@hope log]# echo "A12345678B" | tr '[1-8]' ' ' | unexpand -a A B [root@hope log]# echo "A12345678B" | tr '[1-8]' ' ' | unexpand -a | od -ta 0000000 A ht sp B nl 0000005 [root@hope log]# echo "A12345678B12345678C" | tr '[1-8]' ' ' | unexpand -a | od -ta 0000000 A ht sp B ht sp sp C nl 0000011 [root@hope log]# echo "12345678" | tr '[1-8]' ' ' | unexpand -a | od -ta 0000000 ht nl 0000002 I see that it replaces 8 blanks with one tab, but it appends one more space each time it appears some non-blank character. Using bash-4.3.42-3.fc23.x86_64 and coreutils-8.24-6.fc23.x86_64 Please could you explain this behaviour?

Is it possible for less output to set the tab width to a number X as it is for cat ?

I've got multiple-line text files of (sometimes) tab-delimited data. I'd like to output the file so I can glance over it - so I'd like to only see the first 80 characters of each line (I designed the text file to put the important stuff first on each line). I'd thought I could use cat to read each line of the file, and send each line to the next command in a pipe: cat tabfile | cut -c -80 But that seemed broken. I tried monkeying around, and grep appeared to work - but then I found out that, no it didn't (not every line in the file had 80+ characters) - it appears tabs are counted as single characters by cut. I tried: cat tabfile | tr \t \040 | cut -c -80 Even though that would mangle my data a bit, by eliminating the white-space readability. But that didn't work. Neither did: cat tabfile | tr \011 \040 | cut -c -80 Maybe I'm using tr wrong? I've had trouble with tr before, wanting to remove multiple spaces (appears the version of tr that I have access to on this machine has an -s option for squeezing down multiple characters - I may need to play with it more) I'm sure if I messed around I could use perl, awk or sed, or something to do this. However, I'd like a solution that uses (POSIX?) regular commands, so that it's as portable as possible. If I do end up using tr, I'd probably eventually try turning tabs into characters, maybe do a calculation, cut on the calculation, and then turn those characters back into tabs for the output. It doesn't need to be a single line / entered directly on the command line - a script is fine. --- More info on tab-files: I use tab to break fields, because someday I may want to import data into some other program. So I tend to have only one tab between pieces of content. But I also use tabs to align things with vertical columns, to aid in readability when looking at the plain text file. Which means for some pieces of text I pad the end of the content with spaces until I get to where the tab will work in lining up the next field with the ones above and below it.

DarkTurquoise           #00CED1	        Seas, Skies, Rowboats   Nature
MediumSpringGreen       #00FA9A         Useful for trees        Magic  
Lime                    #00FF00         Only for use on spring chickens and fru$

I prefer to set tabs 4 however this may have some side effects, such as [for example ls out put may look not properly aligned](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/111838/9760) . **How might I configure the terminal / cat to use four spaces for tabs for cat only?** Should I just alias / wrap cat to something that sets tabs 4, runs /bin/cat, then sets it back? My thinking is that this route is less preferable since in fact I would like this behaviour for less, diff, and other utilities.

By default Kate inserts 2 spaces on Tab press but switches to real tabs starting from the fourth Tab level. Can I disable this and use spaces always, regardless to the depth? I want this because I use Kate to code Scala, and using space pairs instead of tabs is a convention there.