Bash – How to enter a literal tab character in a bash shell

bashbash-scripting

For example, I wanted to use the sort utility with the -t option to specify tab separators, but

sort -t "\t"

doesn't work.

Best Answer

Don't use double quotes.

sort -t $'\t'

Or I think Ctrl V inserts a Tab??

Edit:

http://www.gnu.org/s/bash/manual/html_node/ANSI_002dC-Quoting.html#ANSI_002dC-Quoting

Related Solutions

Bash shell tab completion, don’t expand the ~

Disabling tilde expansion is quick and painless. Open up ~/.bashrc and insert this:

_expand()
{
    return 0;
}

This will override the expand function from /etc/bash_completion. I'd recommend commenting on what it does above the function in case you want the expansion back in the future. Changes will take effect in a new instance.

Bash – sort by not first character

tl;dr

sort -k1.5 file | uniq -s 6 -w 5

Explanation

My sort is GNU coreutils 8.22. The manpage for my sort shows:

KEYDEF is F[.C][OPTS][,F[.C][OPTS]] for start and stop position, where F is a field number and  C
       a  character  position  in  the  field;  both are origin 1, and the stop position defaults to the
       line's end.

So with your current sort command, sort -k1,1 file uses the first word to the first word as the sort.

What you want is (for the sort command anyway):

sort -k1.5 file | uniq -s 6 -w 5

This will use the fifth character of the first word, which is what you wanted.