bob parker wrote: > I want to be able to insert tab chars into the output lines eg > sed = somefile | sed 'N;s/\n/\t/' > just gives me the literal 't' immediately following the number at the start > of each line. > [...] > Is there some way of inserting the tab in octal or hex?
This comes up periodically. Here are the two prefered methods.
1. Works way back to UNIX V7 systems (1978). So if you want maximal
portability even to strange systems this one is the want you
want.
TAB=`awk 'BEGIN{printf "\t";}'`
2. This next is my personal preference. The 'printf' command is
XPG4 (1992) but many older hosts don't have it. But you can
always add it to even old systems. Therefore it seems more
modern and more standard.
TAB=$(printf "\t")
Then once you have TAB available, just use it. Your example would
become:
TAB=$(printf "\t")
sed = somefile | sed "N;s/\n/$TAB/"
The need in the bash shell to use -e to expand escape sequences is in
conflict with the current POSIX standards. Therefore I avoid it since
it is not portable even though the standards say it should be.
Bob
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