Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi folks,

Thanks for the reply...sadly to say the issue is still there.

The script is unable to calculate the the TAB space in between the words..such that even if it exceeds col 79....it does'nt count...

But the script can calculate spaces given by "space bar"....

1----------------------------------------------79 #LINE COLOUMN 79
ii[TAB][TAB][TAB]ii[TAB][TAB][TAB]ii[TAB][TAB][TAB]ii
ii[SPACE][SPACE][SPACE]ii[SPACE]ii[SPACE][SPACE][SPACE]ii

The script doesn't work with the first one, but will work perfectly with the second........

Kindly help.....

Neither of those example lines have a display width of over 79 characters. Anyway, again: a tab is a single character and the script counts characters. If you want to work on the display width, you will need to expand tabs one way or another.

Did you try the expand command as suggested above?

Code:

expand <<HERE | egrep -n '.{80}'
# eleven tabs with ii in between them
ii	ii	ii	ii	ii	ii	ii	ii	ii	ii	ii	ii
disregard this short line
# six spaces eleven times, with ii in between
ii      ii      ii      ii      ii      ii      ii      ii      ii      ii      ii      ii
HERE

Please use code tags when posting samples.