I am trying to insert tab's in place of spaces when I tail -f a log and pipe it with grep and cut. Is there a way to take the stdout and format in a way that is tabbed so that all the information is stacked appropriately. I've tried using unexpand. But that did not work. I basically need to know the command to replace or append a tab for a ",<space>".

echo 'a b' | tr ' ' '\t'

thank you. that worked perfectly