UNEXPAND(1)

✨ NAME ✨

unexpand — okay bestie, this is the girl who turns blanks in each FILE into tabs, and writes it all to standard output. No FILE? Or FILE is -? Then she's reading from standard input, periodt. 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

unexpand [OPTION]... [FILE]...

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

So like, unexpand converts blanks in each FILE to tabs, and writes the result to standard output. That's her whole thing. That's the vibe. 🌸

With no FILE, or when FILE is -, she reads from standard input instead. Simple. Iconic. No notes. 😌

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -a, --all — convert all blanks, not just the initial blanks. she's going all in, no half measures 💅
• -f, --first-only — convert only leading sequences of blanks. and yes, this one overrides -a — she said what she said 🙈
• -t, --tabs <N, LIST> — use a comma separated LIST of tab positions, or have tabs N characters apart, instead of 8. psst: this enables -a ✨
• -U, --no-utf8 — interpret the input file as 8-bit ASCII rather than UTF-8. old-school mode fr fr
• -h, --help — Print help 🫶
• -V, --version — Print version ⭐

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👑 VERSION 👑

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Convert blanks in each file to tabs, writing to stdout:

unexpand path/to/file

Convert blanks to tabs, reading from stdout:

unexpand

Convert all blanks, instead of just initial blanks:

unexpand [-a|--all] path/to/file

Convert only leading sequences of blanks (overrides -a):

unexpand --first-only path/to/file

Have tabs a certain number of characters apart, not 8 (enables -a):

unexpand [-t|--tabs] number path/to/file

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. 😭 (not me manifesting they all pass tho 🕯️)

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okay that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 🍓 this was the UNEXPAND(1) page from uutils coreutils 0.12.0, dated 2026-09-25 — general commands manual energy, and honestly? she served. bye pookie, go tab some blanks 💜🧚