c - printf option

Question

When you are printing a tab character to the standard output using printf in C, it outputs some space which is apparently 4 characters in length.

printf("");

Is there any way by which I can control the tab width in the above case? Any help or suggestion is appreciated.

Answer 1

That's something controlled by your terminal, not by printf.

printf simply sends a to the output stream (which can be a tty, a file etc), it doesn't send a number of spaces.