append data in a file by using tab delimiter Post: 302219827

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting append data in a file by using tab delimiter Post 302219827 by era on Wednesday 30th of July 2008 06:54:05 AM

07-30-2008

Registered User

Different shells and different versions of echo work slightly differently, but a literal tab character should always work. At the prompt, you might need to type <ctrl-v> <tab> to get a literal tab.

Note that echo will add a newline (in some versions you can suppress that with the -n option, or with an escape code \c) so it might be better to simply put everything on one line.

Code:

echo "Data1	Data2" >>filename.txt

Or you could pick a unique punctuation character and change it to tab with tr -- again, different shells and different versions of tr might work slightly differently, but this works for me:

Code:

echo "Data1:Data2" | tr : '\010' >>filename.txt

(010 is the octal ASCII code for the tab character. Maybe your tr doesn't understand octal. Maybe your tr does understand '\t' instead. Experiment, and Google.)

Last edited by era; 07-30-2008 at 07:58 AM.. Reason: Note about echo -n

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LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE

echo

ECHO(1) 						    BSD General Commands Manual 						   ECHO(1)

NAME

     echo -- write arguments to the standard output

SYNOPSIS

     echo [-n] [string ...]

DESCRIPTION

     The echo utility writes any specified operands, separated by single blank (' ') characters and followed by a newline ('
') character, to the
     standard output.

     The following option is available:

     -n    Do not print the trailing newline character.  This may also be achieved by appending 'c' to the end of the string, as is done by iBCS2
	   compatible systems.	Note that this option as well as the effect of 'c' are implementation-defined in IEEE Std 1003.1-2001
	   (``POSIX.1'') as amended by Cor. 1-2002.  Applications aiming for maximum portability are strongly encouraged to use printf(1) to sup-
	   press the newline character.

     Some shells may provide a builtin echo command which is similar or identical to this utility.  Most notably, the builtin echo in sh(1) does
     not accept the -n option.	Consult the builtin(1) manual page.

EXIT STATUS

     The echo utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

SEE ALSO

     builtin(1), csh(1), printf(1), sh(1)

STANDARDS

     The echo utility conforms to IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 (``POSIX.1'') as amended by Cor. 1-2002.

BSD
								  April 12, 2003							       BSD

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