On Mon, Sep 21, 2020 at 12:59:32PM -0400, Gary Dale wrote: > Did you try it with Konsole? I got > > $ hd > a b > 00000000 61 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 62 0a |a b.| > 0000000a
In other words, konsole *did* alter the contents. > Most shells (all that I am aware of) treat tabs and blanks as generic white > space - not relevant to the execution of the code. Between arguments, sure. Tabs and spaces are equivalent in those places. But inside a quoted string argument? No, they're not equivalent. Who knows what other conversions might have taken place? You were trying to troubleshoot a script that wasn't doing what you expected. And yet you just hand-waved everything, rather than getting in there and doing the work to actually *check* things.