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hpr0787 :: Grep for tab

Ken submits a summer short explaining how to grep for a tab character in a file

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Hosted by Ken Fallon on Monday, 2011-08-08 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
summer shorts. 1.
The show is available on the Internet Archive at: https://archive.org/details/hpr0787

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Duration: 00:02:38

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In todays summer short Ken tells us about how you can grep for a tab in a file.
grep "first{ctrl+v}{tab}second" file.txt

for more information see https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/tab-in-bash-script-242400/#post4386714

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Comment #1 posted on 2011-08-26 17:01:18 by Krayon

Another way (in BASH)

Another way you can do this would be use the special $'string' expansion which is treated specially and expands string with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard (see under QUOTING of the bash(1) man page for more info).

You could therefore do something like this:
grep "first"$'\t'"second" file.txt

This is also REALLY useful for weird characters (it supports \nnn, \U (unicode)) etc and the like.

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