or download this
perl -Mstrict -we 'my $string="random\ttab\tseparated\twords";
sub tab2space{my ($string,$spacing)=@_;
...
print "\n", tab2space($string) , "\n";'
0123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789
+01234567890
random tab separated words