04-09-2009
Trying to display a tab character in variable
Hi,
I'm trying to figure out a way to encapsulate a tab character, or four or five space characters into a string variable to be used in my script. I'm using the bash shell.
I tried
$variablename=" <string text>"
but it didnt give me the output i wanted (output was still justified to left). I tried \t right after the first quote but it printed the \t. I also tried removing the spaces and inserting an actual tab character but got the same result.
Another thing i wondered was if anyone knew how to format a here document so that if i have a line at the end of the here statement that prompts a user to enter a number, the cursor and their input stays on that line.
Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance.
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PASTE(1) BSD General Commands Manual PASTE(1)
NAME
paste -- merge corresponding or subsequent lines of files
SYNOPSIS
paste [-s] [-d list] file ...
DESCRIPTION
The paste utility concatenates the corresponding lines of the given input files, replacing all but the last file's newline characters with a
single tab character, and writes the resulting lines to standard output. If end-of-file is reached on an input file while other input files
still contain data, the file is treated as if it were an endless source of empty lines.
The options are as follows:
-d list Use one or more of the provided characters to replace the newline characters instead of the default tab. The characters in list
are used circularly, i.e., when list is exhausted the first character from list is reused. This continues until a line from the
last input file (in default operation) or the last line in each file (using the -s option) is displayed, at which time paste
begins selecting characters from the beginning of list again.
The following special characters can also be used in list:
newline character
tab character
\ backslash character
Empty string (not a null character).
Any other character preceded by a backslash is equivalent to the character itself.
-s Concatenate all of the lines of each separate input file in command line order. The newline character of every line except the
last line in each input file is replaced with the tab character, unless otherwise specified by the -d option.
If '-' is specified for one or more of the input files, the standard input is used; standard input is read one line at a time, circularly,
for each instance of '-'.
The paste utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.
SEE ALSO
cut(1)
STANDARDS
The paste utility is expected to be IEEE Std 1003.2 (``POSIX.2'') compatible.
BSD
June 6, 1993 BSD