UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

hi every one

plz help me

i want to search for a line contains tabspace

This is a line The should be changed

see the above line is seperated with tab space i want to replace that tab space in to # as


This is a line#The should be changed
i have tried with
sed 's/[ \t]/#/g' file
but it is not working

plz help me to the tab space into #

Thanks in Advance

By "tab space" do you mean two characters, ASCII 9 and ASCII 32, or one character, just ASCII 9?

If the former, 's/ \t/#/' without the [ ]

If the latter, just 's/\t/#/' should work, although the command line you posted should also (accidentally) work.

If your sed doesn't understand \t then try entering a literal tab. In many shells, you type ctrl-v tab to get an actual tab into your command line.

thanks for reply me,

i tried with both but it shows like this


This#is#a#line The#should#be#changed

plz help me....

Did you try using a literal tab instead of \t in the command?

Try also using tr:

Code:

tr '\011' <file >newfile

Like with sed there are different dialects of tr which understand slightly different syntax.

Or try Perl, which (blissfully) only exists in one implementation:

Code:

perl -pe 's/\t/#/' file

tr -s "\t" "#" <input_filename >output_filename