On Jul 2, 2015, at 5:14 PM, Richard Heintze <sieg_hein...@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. :) -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple