[plug] bash, echo and tabs

[Steve Boak]

Thanks Matt and Lucas

Both useful suggestions. I think I'll go with the printf solution below,
much cleaner and more flexible for what I want to do.

Steve

> Hi Steve
>
> On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, quoth Steve Boak:
>
>> however if I type "echo `df -h /mnt`", I get
>> Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 2.0G 125M 1.9G 7% /
>
>> with all the tabs and the CR replaced by spaces.
>
> Instead of using echo (which replaces those whitespace characters as
> you've discovered" try using printf(1) which is designed to format text
> exactly how you want it - there are printf() functions or equivalents in
> most programming languages, and the command line version works much the
> same.
>
> For example try:
>
>  printf "%s\n" "`df -h /mnt`"
>
>  man 1 printf    for more info on the command line program, and
>
>  man 3 printf    for info on the C function it implements (to see what
>                  formatting flags are available)
>
>  - Matt
>
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>


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