Programming with the UNIX system shell

Setting terminal options

The stty command can make your shell environment more convenient. You can use these options with stty: -tabs and echoe.

stty -tabs: This option preserves tabs when you are printing. It expands the tab setting to eight spaces, which is the default. The number of spaces for each tab can be changed. (See stty(1) for details.)
stty echoe: If you have a terminal with a screen, this option erases characters from the screen as you erase them with the <BACKSPACE> key.

If you want to use these options for the stty command, you can create those command lines in your .profile just as you would create them in a shell program. If you use the tail command, which displays the last few lines of a file, you can see the results of adding those three command lines to your .profile:

   $ tail -3 .profile
   echo Good Morning! I am ready to work for you
   stty -tabs
   stty echoe
   $