So in the tabs vs spaces war I’m squarely on the side of use tabs. tabs have meaning. tabs allow people to set there editor’s to whatever space display width their eyes are comfortable with as opposed to what yours are (e.g. you like 2 spaces I like 4). However, I’ve heard the argument what about when you cat the file, etc. Well it is actually a bit annoying… so let’s fix it.

my requirements when I type cat foo if foo has tabs they will be displayed at 4 spaces, and I can still pass all cli options as I normally would to cat. To do this we’re going to create a shell function called etcat()

1
2
3

etcat() {
    env cat "$@" | env expand -t 4;
}

I’d like to note, that in order for this to work you must use either an absolute path or a call to env cat because otherwise the shell will attempt to call cat as a recursive function. I put this in my .alias file and sourced it.

you can now put alias cat="etcat" in your aliases file, or run etcat. This is to protect you from any problems that could otherwise be caused by overriding cat in scripts you don’t control (not that I’m actually aware of any for this function).

P.S. Thanks to @greybot on #bash for the incantation as I was having trouble with the "$@"

Update changed name of function