Spaces converting to Tabs

Have a baffling situation.

I'm running Oracle 7.3 on a Sequent Box, dynix operating system.

We invoke sqlplus from a korn shell script, retrieve the nextval from a sequence generator, redirect the output to a file and...

then fire up sed and replace all leading spaces with zeros.

Things usually work fine, however (sporadically), if the nextval is a 2 digit number (the sequence is defined as a NUMBER 10), the file contains a \t character, instead of the 8 leading spaces.

This is causing some major headaches.
I've verified that it is not terminal emulation. I don't see any obvious environment variables being set.... This happens on at least two of the Sequent Boxes we're running

Any ideas?

Any suggestions sincerely appreciated

Best Regards

Wayne  

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Wayne Miner                                          Speedware Programmer
aka wayne_at_sonic.net                                  
Good things: Newfoundland Dogs, Am Flyer trains      Bad things: The FDA