Re: how to replace three spaces with tab

[Eric Bambach <eric@cisu.net>]

sed 's/   /\t/' largefile.txt > largefile.edited

Notice that s/(Three spaces)/(special Tab character sequence)/

This will replace ALL occurances of 3 spaces in your file. Make sure you dont 
have 3 spaces in any other context or those will be changed too. It will 
output to a new file in case i didnt get it right ;)

On Thursday 02 June 2005 05:11 pm, James Miller wrote:
> Here's another example of what looks like something that should be fairly
> straightforward but which I've been struggling with for at least an hour
> and cannot find an answer. I ran into this before and was similarly
> stumped, so I did it all manually. This time I just want to get it done
> and finally find out the secret, my ignorance, or whether this really is
> one of those irresolvable riddles of (Linux) life.
>
> I have a document that consists of about 5,500 entries, each on its own
> line. If this matters, it's a block file to block out advertising by
> resolving certain domains to the localhost (127.0.0.1). In each line of
> the file as I saved it, there are three space characters between the IP
> and the domain name (damn that elinks browser for doing that!). For my
> router to effectively use the file, each of those 5,500 three-space
> sequences need to be changed to a tab sequence--like when you press the
> tab key while typing in a document. How can I automate this?
>
> I know how I'd do it in Word, but I've sworn off that sorry excuse for a
> piece of software (those guys in Redmond will be jumping with glee when
> they read this one: man with naive open source principles walks off Linux
> precipice). None of the Linux equivalents I've tried (Abiword, OpenOffice,
> gedit, nano) gives any indication of how a tab character can be inserted
> in their search-and-replace feature. There are no formatting characters to
> select, as they call them in smarmy M$ speak. The search-and-replace
> dialogues all understand hitting the tab key as the user wanting to move
> to the next field, not as data entry. There's probably a simple command
> line way to do this, but if I were adept enough at simple command line
> stuff, I'd have found it already. Can anyone offer pointers on how to
> automate replacement of the 5,500 three-space sequences with a tab
> sequence?
>
> Thanks, James
>
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-- 
----------------------------------------
--EB

> All is fine except that I can reliably "oops" it simply by trying to read
> from /proc/apm (e.g. cat /proc/apm).
> oops output and ksymoops-2.3.4 output is attached.
> Is there anything else I can contribute?

The latitude and longtitude of the bios writers current position, and
a ballistic missile.

                --Alan Cox LKML-December 08,2000 

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