replacing tabs to spaces from files

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

hi,
I have some 50 C files in which for indentation of code some devlopers used tabs, but we dont want any tab used for indentation.

I have following 2 need.

1) find tabs from all 50 files (which are in one directory )
2) replace them with 4 spaces.

Thanks
Rishi

2

man tr
man fold

3

hi ,
I am doing like,
1) getting total no of files for which i will run a loop,
a=`ls -1 |wc -l`
2) got sed command in net to chnage the tab to space.

sed s/tab/spacespacespace/g' filename.tabs >filename.no tabs.

Could anyone help in 1) how to put this sed command in loop.
2) how to write in a temp file and convert it back(rename) to the original name.

Thanks & regards

4 
#!/bin/ksh

for iter in *
do
    sed 's/tab/spacespacespace/g' "${iter}" > filename.notabs && mv filename.notabs "${iter}"
done
5

You probably do not want to replace a tab character with exactly 4 spaces. If tabstops are set at exactly 4 spaces, then a tab might be one space or it might be 4 spaces or anything in between. The idea with tabs is to get stuff to line up. If this is the the case, you need to use the "expand" program. There is also an unexpand program and both have man pages.

6

Thanks a lot, it really worked

7

ooops, sorry - I meant 'man expand' [not 'man fold']