Nix: Remove backspaces and tabs with col

Say you want to save the contents of the cp man page to a file.

In the case of man page output there are backspaces and tabs that can throw off the ASCII text so you’ll probably want to clean that up.

Luckily there is a command, col and a couple of flags -b an -x that will remove backspaces and convert tabs to spaces.

So in the end the command you wind up with is something like:

man cp | col -bx > ~/Desktop/man_cp.txt

Via the maccast.