Re: sort does not use tab as delimiter

[The Wanderer]

Paul Eggert wrote:

> DI Oliver Maurhart <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > I've noticed that sort doesn't use the tab as delimiter when
> > provided by the '-t' option.
>
> Actually it does, if you invoke it this way:
>
>      sort -t '  ' -k 2 FILE
>
> Note that there is a tab between the two apostrophes.

Note also that this may not be possible in some shells (specifically, so
far as I've been able to discover, bash), because they interpret an
entered tab not as a literal 'character' but as an invocation of
tab-completion. It does still work just fine in shell scripts, and I've
written a few on-the-spot one-liners when I needed to pass tabs to
programs in this way.

--
      The Wanderer

Warning: Simply because I argue an issue does not mean I agree with any
side of it.

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.