Re: gnu indent: where are the tabs?

[Dan Hipschman]

On Sat, May 26, 2007 at 03:25:35PM -0700, Rui Maciel wrote:
> I've just started looking into gnu indent and I'm having some trouble
> making it format the source code using tabs. In the man pages it is
> said that the -ut and -ts options could handle that but no matter how
> I run indent, the source code still appears exactly like if it was run
> with indent --no-tabs.

The -ut and -ts options only specify the use of tabs in general.  They
don't affect indentation.  I haven't used indent in a while, but after
playing with it for a bit, this seems like a good set of options for
you:

        indent -i8 -bli0 -npsl -npcs foo.c

The -i8 option says to indent 8 spaces, and these will be turned into
tabs by default.  The -bli0 option tells it not to indent curly braces
(which are, by default, indented 2 spaces in accordance with GNU
conventions).  The -npsl option says not to add a line break after
function return types, and -npcs indicates no space between function
names and argument lists (although your own example is inconsistent in
that respect, so you may not like that option).

> int test(int param)
> {
>         if (param == 1))
>         {
>                 printf ("error\n");
>                 return EXIT_SUCCESS;
>         }
>         return EXIT_SUCCESS;
> }

Here's the result, minus an unmatched parenthesis that slipped into your
example:

$ indent -i8 -bli0 -npsl -npcs foo.c ; cat foo.c
int test(int param)
{
        if (param == 1)
        {
                printf("error\n");
                return EXIT_SUCCESS;
        }
        return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

There are a lot more options to fine tune results, all listed in the man
page.  Hope that helps.