Re: sort does not use tab as delimiter

[Eric Blake]

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According to DI Oliver Maurhart on 12/11/2006 1:03 AM:
> 
> No. Actually the $'\t' works! It's pretty cool. I'm into Linux for
> several years now, but everyday you get surprised by such small goodies.
> Didn't know of that one.

Both bash and zsh support this extension, but yes, it is not specified by
POSIX.

> 
> On the other side, I wonder, if this is also available on other shells
> like csh, korn-shell or some XYZ-Shell.
> 
> So I still believe that sort should be capable of handling tabs on its
> own and not to depend on a user's shell feature to correctly pass on
> this literal.

Ctrl-V is pretty much the standard default in UNIX terminals for quoting
the next character typed, which means the sequence [ctrl-v] then [tab] is
almost universally accepted, regardless of whether you use bash, ksh, ash,
or even csh.  With ctrl-v, it is the terminal doing the quoting and not
your shell.  And if you don't like ctrl-v, then play with 'stty lnext'.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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