Here is a good one for the group. I've found a workaround so waste too much time on this. I'm trying to sort a text file using tab as a field separator. sort allows you to sort by a field with -k. The default field separator is whitespace, I need tabs. Sort allows you to set the field separator with -t, however it chokes when you tell it to use "\t". Observe: [tomp at lotsa sort]$ cat tab.txt 1 cherry 2 orange 3 grape 4 apple 5 mango [tomp at lotsa sort]$ sort -t "\t" -k 2 tab.txt > sorted.txt sort: multi-character tab `\t' [tomp at lotsa sort]$ cat sorted.txt It's an empty file. I did found a workaround (those are back-ticks not single quotes) [tomp at lotsa sort]$ TAB=`echo -e "\t"` [tomp at lotsa sort]$ sort -t "$TAB" -k 2 tab.txt > sorted.txt [tomp at lotsa sort]$ cat sorted.txt 4 apple 1 cherry 3 grape 5 mango 2 orange according to google this works as expected in Unix but not in linux. http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-textutils@gnu.org/msg00833.html Does anyone know why I can't use "\t" in sort to set a tab? -- Tom Penney <blots at visi.com> _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list