Bruno Haible wrote: > Hi Jim, > > Jim Meyering wrote: >> It is trivial to avoid leading TABs in a script >> that emits a Makefile snippet with leading TABs. >> Here's one way that is perhaps minimally invasive: >> The change replaces each explicit leading TAB with 8 leading >> spaces and converts each "cat" to a sed command that performs >> the desired 8-sp-to-TAB mapping. > > Thanks for the suggestion. It fixes the "make check" complaint. > But the major problem with tabs in .m4 files is that it can get > broken in the future by someone who accidentally untabifies the entire > file. If we're going to add complexity here, I would much prefer that > it gets rid of this problem. > > In other words, do you know how to put a tab into a shell variable, > without writing a tab in the source file? For newline, we write > > nl=' > ' > > tab=`printf '\t'` > > appears to work. Is it portable?
Yes, that is what I would use.
