> what do you want to do?

I have files containing tab separated data.  Some lines are too 
long (exceed 80 characters) if tabs are expanded to 8 spaces. I 
want to use shell level tools like cat, sort, and awk without 
line breaks when the standard output hits the terminal screen. 
If I can reset tabs to 2 spaces, this will work.  

> read man 5 termcap or man 1 tput 

Will do.  Thank you.  

Tom