Shell Programming and Scripting

I'm working on my little Script that writes two pieces of data at a time, with different variables, vendor and alias, to a file. I can't seem to figure out how to separate them with a space, tab, or some other kind of separator so I can read them individually from the file at a later time. Can anyone point me in the right direction. I'm using a simple echo >> to append them to the file, but it's all one word. How, for example would I include a tab as part of the writing so the Script can pick out one from the other? Right now each entry is just one word.

please post a snippet of you script - our crystal balls (pun intended) are somewhat fuzzy lately!

I Hope it hasn't been too long. Here are the lines that write the data to the file:

Code:

echo -n $vendor >> ~/vendorlists/$vendorfilename   echo $alias >> ~/vendorlists/$vendorfilename

It suppresses the newline character so both bits of data are on the same line, but there's no space between them so instead of getting, say

dog cat

I get

dogcat

Code:

echo "${vendor} ${alias}" >> ~/vendorlists/${vendorfilename}