On Saturday 22 March 2008 21:18:11 Amadeus W.M. wrote: > 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? Take the double quotes out in your first attempt. So command becomes cat file | sort -k 3 -t \t Nick
