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From: asrap@warwick.ac.uk (Sean Legassick)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: sort with a tab as separator
Message-ID: <1990Aug30.175426.10657@warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 30 Aug 90 17:54:26 GMT
References: <1990Aug19.051237.27735@midway.uchicago.edu>
Sender: news@warwick.ac.uk (Network news)
Organization: University of Warwick, UK
Lines: 35

In article <1990Aug19.051237.27735@midway.uchicago.edu> phd_ivo@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:
=In article <13617@smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes...
= 
=+So get a real shell:
=+	$ echo '   ' | od -c
=+	0000000  \t  \n
=
=On a NeXT improved csh (and presumably on some other shells), the following
=works:
=
=	sort -t\^V^I
=
=that is, the tab must be quoted twice: once with the backslash, and then with
=the ^V (control-V) to not substitute spaces.
=

Okay, csh is seriously f*cked. However:

csh% echo '	' | od -c
0000000   \t  \n
0000002

tcsh% echo '^	' | od -c 	(NB: ^V needed before TAB as TAB has special
					meaning in tcsh)
0000000   \t  \n 
0000002

So *csh may not be a 'real shell' but this I'm afraid it does do (Sun-4,
SunOs 4.0.3).

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Sean Legassick,       cuuee@uk.ac.warwick.cu  "Improbability factor of one
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