I'm trying to use sort on a file with tab-delimited fields. I can't figure out how to tell sort to use the tab character as the field separator. I'm trying this on both an HP Unix system and on OS X (using bash on both).

Things I've tried:
sort -t\t
sort -t"\t"
sort -t\"\t\"

I've tried other things out of desperation, but nothing has worked so far.
I've looked through all the messages on the forum but couldn't find an answer. I found one message where someone was using the third form above, but that didn't work for me.

TIA,
-Steve