[colug-432] Portable Visible Tabs in Shell Scripts

[Seth Hall]

On Aug 9, 2011, at 6:48 PM, jep200404 at columbus.rr.com wrote:

> Unfortunately, it seems to be a bashism and to not work in 
> (plain) bourne shells. 
> I've been trying to find a portable way of _visibly_ putting 
> tab characters in shell scripts. 

My hacky solution if you want or need it visibly...

TAB=`printf "\t"`
echo "${TAB}This is indented"

Of course, I think that using {} for string interpolation is another bash-ism but you can do it other ways.

  .Seth

--
Seth Hall
International Computer Science Institute
(Bro) because everyone has a network
http://www.bro-ids.org/