I also remember old school bourne shell wanting tabs in some places (case statements?), but bash doesn't have that issue.
replyThese days, I try avoid them outside of makefiles.
Considering the way `/bin/sh` had a bunch of different implementations before POSIX standardization minimized that in the mid-1990s, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of those distinguished spaces from tabs.
replyThat said, the original UNIX V7 implementation of /bin/sh didn’t distinguish different kinds of whitespace: