You would think specifying tab as a field separator for sort would work like this: cat file | sort -k 3 -t "\t" It doesn't: sort: multi-character tab `\\t' So after a little search and some trial and error I got this to work: cat file | sort -k 3 -t "`/bin/echo -e '\t'`" For my own curiosity, can someone please illuminate me as to why the first incantation does not work as expected? Is there a more natural way to specify \t other than echo?
