Echo tab characters in bash script

Question

How do I echo one or more tab characters using a bash script  When I run this code  res          x   res     t tx  echo     res      expect   t tx    I get this  res   x    that is   lt space gt x

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From the bash man page      Words of the form   string  are treated specially   The word expands to string  with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard    So you can do this   echo   hello tworld

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Use printf  not echo   There are multiple different versions of the echo command   There s  bin echo  which may or may not be the GNU Coreutils version  depending on the system   and the echo command is built into most shells   Different versions have different ways  or no way  to specify or disable escapes for control characters   printf  on the other hand  has much less variation   It can exist as a command  typically  bin printf  and it s built into some shells  bash and zsh have it  tcsh and ksh don t   but the various versions are much more similar to each other than the different versions of echo are   And you don t have to remember command-line options  with a few exceptions  GNU Coreutils printf accepts --version and --help  and the built-in bash printf accepts -v var to store the output in a variable    For your example   res              x   res     t tx  printf   s n     res     And now it s time for me to admit that echo will work just as well for the example you re asking about  you just need to put double quotes around the argument   echo    res     as kmkaplan wrote  two and a half years ago  I just noticed     The problem with your original commands   res              x   res     t tx  echo     res      expect   t tx    isn t with echo  it s that the shell replaced the tab with a space before echo ever saw it   echo is fine for simple output  like echo hello world  but you should use printf whenever you want to do something more complex   You can get echo to work  but the resulting code is likely to fail when you run it with a different echo implementation or a different shell

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If you want to use echo  a tb  in a script  you run the script as     sh -e myscript sh   Alternatively  you can give to myscript sh the execution permission  and then run the script     chmod  x myscript sh     myscript sh

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Put your string between double quotes   echo    res

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Using echo to print values of variables is a common Bash pitfall  Reference link   http   mywiki wooledge org BashPitfalls echo  24foo

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echo -e    t     will echo  space tab space newline   -e means  enable interpretation of backslash escapes       echo -e    t     hexdump -C 00000000  20 09 20 0a

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you need to use  -e flag for echo then you can   echo -e   t t x

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Use the verbatim keystroke   V  CTRL V  C-v  whatever    When you type  V into the terminal  or in most Unix editors   the following character is taken verbatim   You can use this to type a literal tab character inside a string you are echoing   Something like the following works   echo   V lt tab gt         CTRL V  TAB   Bash docs  q v    quoted-insert       quoted-insert  C-q  C-v    Add the next character that you type to the line verbatim  This is how to insert key sequences like C-q  for example    side note  according to this  ALT TAB should do the same thing  but we ve all bound that sequence to window switching so we can t use it     tab-insert  M-TAB    Insert a tab character    --  Note  you can use this strategy with all sorts of unusual characters   Like a carriage return   echo   V M           CTRL V  CTRL M   This is because carriage return is ASCII 13  and M is the 13th letter of the alphabet  so when you type  M  you get the 13th ASCII character   You can see it in action using ls M  at an empty prompt  which will insert a carriage return  causing the prompt to act just like you hit return   When these characters are normally interpreted  verbatim gets you get the literal character

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You can also try   echo Hello   t world

User · Answer

res   t tx  echo -e     res

[bash] Echo tab characters in bash script

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