how to display spaces and tabs using unix and the “cat” command

Question

I\'m trying to figure out how to display the contents of a file through unix where the spaces and tabs are marked somehow. I know how to display the files with tabs (aka c

Answer 1

There's a standard unix tool for character substitution. In this example, I'm replacing spaces for * and tabs for &:

$ cat tmp
space tab   space   tab end
tab space   tab space end
$ cat tmp | tr " " "*" | tr "\t" "&" 
space*tab&space&tab&end
tab&space&tab*space*end