[Expectperl-discuss] Tab translation difference between AIX and Linux

[Christoph S. <csc...@am...>]

Hello,

after looking some time into documentation about terminals and ttys, I'm 
still not any further. I guess I need help.

In my setup I use expect to spawn shells (rsh to AIX), (ssh to Linux), to 
a lot of remote shells in parallel. So far so good, there is no problem 
with that. Only, when talking to something like 30 boxes, the connection 
closure takes a while, but OK, that's all.

The thingy described before (called shiva) is called by another one called 
(egalite) to retrieve output from many hosts and compare the gathered 
files. My problem is when comparing files coming from AIX (5.2) boxes to 
files coming from Linux (suse 9.? on Itanium), that the diff doesn't match 
because TAB (x09) is translated on AIX boxes, but not on Linux. A hack 
would be to give diff the option to ignore whitespaces, but this will 
cause problems on another side, hence don't like it really.

I have tried the terminals (setting $ENV{'TERM'}) dumb, net and ansi, but 
the tab-situation is for all of them the same. I don't modify the stty 
settings other than to deactivate echoing (for both Lnx & AIX).

As I assume to talk to remote boxes of different types has probably done 
by somebody... (but if somebody has compared the output already?)... I 
hope that somebody has found a solution to this one already. That would be 
great! 

Otherwise, I guess a cat need to postprocess the output rather. That will 
do the trick too..

Thanks in advance.

Christoph Schwaiger.

PS: If somebody knows a good documentation covering the whole data path 
from the perl expect through the pseudo tty, to the process, to the 
remshell and so on...feel free to make me aware of it!