Updated: 2022/Sep/29

Please read Privacy Policy. It's for your privacy.

TABS(1)                     General Commands Manual                    TABS(1)

NAME
     tabs - set terminal tabs

SYNOPSIS
     tabs [-n|-a|-a2|-c|-c2|-c3|-f|-p|-s|-u] [+m[n]] [-T type]
     tabs [-T type] [+[n]] n1[,n2,...]

DESCRIPTION
     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

ENVIRONMENT
     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.

EXIT STATUS
     The tabs utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO
     expand(1), stty(1), tput(1), unexpand(1), terminfo(5)

STANDARDS
     The tabs utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1 ("POSIX.1").

HISTORY
     A tabs utility first appeared in PWB UNIX.  This implementation was
     introduced in NetBSD 6.0.

AUTHORS
     Roy Marples <roy@NetBSD.org>

NetBSD 10.99                     April 5, 2012                    NetBSD 10.99