Subject: Re: bug#25553: How many coreutils rely on tabs to align things (other, than 'du'?

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2017 16:20:07 -0800

L A Walsh wrote:
>     The idea would be to have it be transparent. Adding
> on various output filters is hardly transparent.

Nor is having behavior depend on environment variables.

>     As for env-vars.  What problems are you envisioning.

Shell scripts might stop working because the environment variables are not set 
up in the usual or desired way. This is a common problem with other environment 
variables. In the past, we've relied on the environment too often for 
relatively-unimportant things. We should not repeat this mistake.

>     As for 'expand' handling the job -- how would
> expand convert tabstops from 'du' into the tabstops used by
> an arbitrary terminal?  For that matter, since directory and
> file sizes often exceed 8-characters forcing du's output to not align, how can a
> user have 'du' align it's columns
> automatically, as my additions can do?

Send du's output to a file, look for the longest number in the file, and adjust 
column width accordingly. Whatever tabstops you like, you can tell to 'expand'. 
Expanding tabs is the job of 'expand', not of every program that outputs tabs.