On Unix-like operating systems, the expand command copies files (or the standard input) to the standard output, with tab characters expanded to space characters. Backspace characters are preserved into the output and decrement the column count for tab calculations.

The unexpand command reverses this process.

This page covers the GNU/Linux versions of expand and unexpand.

Description

expand is useful for pre-processing character files (before sorting, looking at specific columns, and so forth) that contain tab characters.

  • Description
  • Syntax
  • Examples
  • Related commands
  • Linux commands help

Syntax

expand [OPTION]… [FILE]…

unexpand [OPTION]… [FILE]…

Expand options

Unexpand options

Examples

expand myfile.txt

Expand the file myfile.txt, changing tabs to spaces, and display on standard output.

expand –tabs=10 myfile.txt > myfile2.txt

Converts the tabs in the file myfile.txt to 10 spaces each, and write the output to myfile2.txt.

tabs — Set tab stops on a terminal.