How can I convert tabs to spaces in every file of a directory

Question

How can I convert tabs to spaces in every file of a directory  possibly recursively    Also  is there a way of setting the number of spaces per tab

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Simple replacement with sed is okay but not the best possible solution   If there are  extra  spaces between the tabs they will still be there after substitution  so the margins will be ragged   Tabs expanded in the middle of lines will also not work correctly  In bash  we can say instead  find   -name    java    -type d -exec bash -c  expand -t 4   0   gt   tmp e  amp  amp  mv  tmp e   0           to apply expand to every Java file in the current directory tree  Remove   replace the -name argument if you re targeting some other file types  As one of the comments mentions  be very careful when removing -name or using a weak  wildcard  You can easily clobber repository and other hidden files without intent  This is why the original answer included this      You should always make a backup copy of the tree before trying something like this in case something goes wrong

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One can use vim for that   find -type f    -name    css  -o -name    html  -o -name    js  -o -name    php     -execdir vim -c retab -c wq         As Carpetsmoker stated  it will retab according to your vim settings  And modelines in the files  if any  Also  it will replace tabs not only at the beginning of the lines  Which is not what you generally want  E g   you might have literals  containing tabs

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Use the vim-way     ex   bufdo retab  -cxa           Make the backup  before executing the above command  as it can corrupt your binary files  To use globstar      for recursion  activate by shopt -s globstar  To specify specific file type  use for example       c    To modify tabstop  add   set ts 2    However the down-side is that it can replace tabs inside the strings   So for slightly better solution  by using substitution   try     ex -s   bufdo  s   t      ge  -cxa          Or by using ex editor   expand utility     ex -s   bufdo   expand -t2  -cxa          For trailing spaces  see  How to remove trailing whitespaces for multiple files     You may add the following function into your  bash profile     Convert tabs to spaces    Usage  retab       See  https   stackoverflow com q 11094383 55075 retab       ex   set ts 2    bufdo retab  -cxa

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My recommendation is to use   find   -name    lua  -exec ex    s  t    g  -cwq         Comments    Use in place editing  Keep backups in a VCS  No need to produce   orig files  It s good practice to diff the result against your last commit to make sure this worked as expected  in any case  sed is a stream editor  Use ex for in place editing  This avoids creating extra temp files and spawning shells for each replacement as in the top answer   WARNING  This messes with all tabs  not only those used for indentation  Also it does not do context aware replacement of tabs  This was sufficient for my use case  But might not be acceptable for you  EDIT  An earlier version of this answer used find xargs instead of find -exec  As pointed out by  gniourf-gniourf this leads to problems with spaces  quotes and control chars in file names cf  Wheeler

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How can I convert tabs to spaces in every file of a directory  possibly   recursively     This is usually not what you want   Do you want to do this for png images  PDF files  The  git directory  Your Makefile  which requires tabs   A 5GB SQL dump   You could  in theory  pass a whole lot of exlude options to find or whatever else you re using  but this is fragile  and will break as soon as you add other binary files   What you want  is at least    Skip files over a certain size  Detect if a file is binary by checking for the presence of a NULL byte  Only replace tabs at the start of a file  expand does this  sed doesn t     As far as I know  there is no  standard  Unix utility that can do this  and it s not very easy to do with a shell one-liner  so a script is needed   A while ago I created a little script called sanitize files which does exactly that  It also fixes some other common stuff like replacing  r n with  n  adding a trailing  n  etc   You can find a simplified script without the extra features and command-line arguments below  but I recommend you use the above script as it s more likely to receive bugfixes and other updated than this post   I would also like to point out  in response to some of the other answers here  that using shell globbing is not a robust way of doing this  because sooner or later you ll end up with more files than will fit in ARG MAX  on modern Linux systems it s 128k  which may seem a lot  but sooner or later it s not enough         usr bin env python     http   code arp242 net sanitize files    import os  re  sys   def is binary data       return data find b  000    gt   0   def should ignore path       keep               VCS systems           git      hg     svn    CVS               These files have significant whitespace tabs  and cannot be edited           safely           TODO  there are probably more of these files            Makefile    BSDmakefile    GNUmakefile    Gemfile lock             for k in keep          if    s    k in path              return True     return False   def run files       indent find   b  t      indent replace   b         indent width      for f in files          if should ignore f               print  Ignoring  s    f              continue          try              size   os stat f  st size           Unresolvable symlink  just ignore those         except FileNotFoundError as exc              print   s is unresolvable  skipping   s      f  exc               continue          if size    0  continue         if size  gt  1024    2              print  Skipping   s  because it s over 1MiB    f              continue          try              data   open f   rb   read           except  OSError  PermissionError  as exc              print  Error  Unable to read   s    s     f  exc               continue          if is binary data               print  Skipping   s  because it looks binary    f              continue          data   data split b  n            fixed indent   False         for i  line in enumerate data                 Fix indentation             repl count   0             while line startswith indent find                   fixed indent   True                 repl count    1                 line   line replace indent find  b    1               if repl count  gt  0                  line   indent replace   repl count   line          data   list filter lambda x  x is not None  data            try              open f   wb   write b  n  join data           except  OSError  PermissionError  as exc              print  Error  Unable to write to   s    s     f  exc     if   name         main         allfiles          for root  dirs  files in os walk os getcwd             for f in files              p     s  s     root  f              if do add                  allfiles append p       run allfiles

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I used astyle to re-indent all my C C   code after finding mixed tabs and spaces   It also has options to force a particular brace style if you d like

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Converting tabs to space in just in   lua  files  tabs -  2 spaces   find   -iname    lua  -exec sed -i  s  t    g

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You can use find with tabs-to-spaces package for this   First  install tabs-to-spaces  npm install -g tabs-to-spaces   then  run this command from the root directory of your project   find   -name     -exec t2s --spaces 2         This will replace every tab character with 2 spaces in every file

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No body mentioned rpl  Using rpl you can replace any string  To convert tabs to spaces   rpl -R -e   t              very simple

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Download and run the following script to recursively convert hard tabs to soft tabs in plain text files   Execute the script from inside the folder which contains the plain text files      bin bash  find   -type f -and -not -path     git    -exec grep -Iq         -and -print   while read -r file  do       echo  Converting      file        data   expand --initial -t 4   file        rm   file       echo   data   gt    file      done

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You can use  the generally available pr command  man page here    For example  to convert tabs to four spaces  do this   pr -t -e 4 file  gt  file expanded    -t suppresses headers -e num expands tabs to num spaces   To convert all files in a directory tree recursively  while skipping binary files      bin bash num 4 shopt -s globstar nullglob for f in       do      -f   f          continue   skip if not a regular file     grep -qI   f   amp  amp  continue   skip binary files   pr -t -e  num   f   gt    f expanded      amp  amp  mv   f expanded       f  done   The logic for skipping binary files is from this post   NOTE    Doing this could be dangerous in a git or svn repo This is not the right solution if you have code files that have tabs embedded in string literals

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Try the command line tool expand   expand -i -t 4 input   sponge output   where   -i is used to expand only leading tabs on each line  -t 4 means that each tab will be converted to 4 whitespace chars  8 by default   sponge is from the moreutils package  and avoids clearing the input file    Finally  you can use gexpand on OSX  after installing coreutils with Homebrew  brew install coreutils

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Collecting the best comments from Gene s answer  the best solution by far  is by using sponge from moreutils    sudo apt-get install moreutils   The complete one-liner  find    -iname    java  -type f -exec bash -c  expand -t 4   0    sponge   0           Explanation        is recursively searching from current directory -iname is a case insensitive match  for both   java and   JAVA likes  type -f finds only regular files  no directories  binaries or symlinks  -exec bash -c execute following commands in a subshell for each file name     expand -t 4 expands all TABs to 4 spaces sponge soak up standard input  from expand  and write to a file  the same one       NOTE    A simple file redirection   gt    0   won t work here because it would overwrite the file too soon   Advantage  All original file permissions are retained and no intermediate tmp files are used

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I like the  find  example above for the recursive application  To adapt it to be non-recursive  only changing files in the current directory that match a wildcard  the shell glob expansion can be sufficient for small amounts of files   ls   java   awk   print  expand -t 4     0     gt   tmp e  mv  tmp e     0     sh -v   If you want it silent after you trust that it works  just drop the -v on the sh command at the end   Of course you can pick any set of files in the first command  For example  list only a particular subdirectory  or directories  in a controlled manner like this   ls mod     php   awk   print  expand -t 4     0     gt   tmp e  mv  tmp e     0     sh   Or in turn run find 1  with some combination of depth parameters etc   find mod  -name    php  -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 2   awk   print  expand -t 4     0     gt   tmp e  mv  tmp e     0     sh

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The use of expand as suggested in other answers seems the most logical approach for this task alone   That said  it can also be done with Bash and Awk in case you may want to do some other modifications along with it   If using Bash 4 0 or greater  the shopt builtin globstar can be used to search recursively with      With GNU Awk version 4 1 or greater  sed like  inplace  file modifications can be made   shopt -s globstar gawk -i inplace   gsub   t          1       ext   In case you want to set the number of spaces per tab   gawk -i inplace -v n 4  BEGIN for i 1 i lt  n i    c c     gsub   t  c  1       ext

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Use backslash-escaped sed   On linux    Replace all tabs with 1 hyphen inplace  in all   txt files   sed -i   s  t - g    txt  Replace all tabs with 1 space inplace  in all   txt files   sed -i   s  t   g    txt  Replace all tabs with 4 spaces inplace  in all   txt files   sed -i   s  t      g    txt    On a mac    Replace all tabs with 4 spaces inplace  in all   txt files   sed -i      s  t      g    txt

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Warning  This will break your repo  This will corrupt binary files  including those under svn   git  Read the comments before using   find   -iname    java  -type f -exec sed -i orig  s  t      g       The original file is saved as  filename  orig  Replace    java  with the file ending of the file type you are looking for  This way you can prevent accidental corruption of binary files  Downsides   Will replace tabs everywhere in a file  Will take a long time if you happen to have a 5GB SQL dump in this directory

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To convert all Java files recursively in a directory to use 4 spaces instead of a tab   find   -type f -name   java -exec bash -c  expand -t 4     gt   tmp stuff mv  tmp stuff

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Git repository friendly method  git-tab-to-space       d    mktemp -d     git grep --cached -Il      grep -E    1 -            xargs -I     bash -c        f    1  f         amp  amp  expand -t 4   0   gt    f   amp  amp        chmod --reference   0    f   amp  amp        mv   f    0                d          rmdir   d      Act on all files under the current directory   git-tab-to-space   Act only on C or C   files   git-tab-to-space     c h   pp      You likely want this notably because of those annoying Makefiles which require tabs   The command git grep --cached -Il       lists only the tracked files  so nothing inside  git excludes directories  binary files  would be corrupted   and symlinks  would be converted to regular files    as explained at  How to list all text  non-binary  files in a git repository   chmod --reference keeps the file permissions unchanged  https   unix stackexchange com questions 20645 clone-ownership-and-permissions-from-another-file Unfortunately I can t find a succinct POSIX alternative   If your codebase had the crazy idea to allow functional raw tabs in strings  use   expand -i   and then have fun going over all non start of line tabs one by one  which you can list with  Is it possible to git grep for tabs   Tested on Ubuntu 18 04

[bash] How can I convert tabs to spaces in every file of a directory?

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