Shell Programming and Scripting

As far as I know, only GNU sed interprets that undefined sequence as a tab character. If that is incorrect, I'll update this recent post which discusses this in more detail: https://www.unix.com/302674253-post6.html

Regards,
Alister

I've found more sed implementations that accept \t than ones that don't.

Ones that don't, often don't accept \n either.

AFAIK Posix sed does not accept '\t' as a representation for the TAB character. I have only encountered support for \t with GNU sed (and derivatives)

Your findings are highly atypical (with respect to the usual workstation/server unix experience).

None of the native sed implementations on the following systems support \t (yet all support \n): Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, (Free|Net|Open)BSD, OS X.

Before reading your post, I had never even heard of a sed implementation whose regular expression grammar did not include \n as a sequence for a newline. For whatever it's worth, the \n sequence has been part of sed since the very beginning (1979); it is mentioned in the UNIX Seventh Edition manual (vol 2b), http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/ (\t is not).

Regards,
Alister

The idea that \n would not be supported by some sed implementations probably stems from the fact that with the s-command \n is only supported in the regex part, not in the replacement part (again with the exception of GNU sed)..




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The y-command in sed supports \n on both sides...

For the sake of argument, another way:

Code:

$ sed 's/|/<Ctrl-V><TAB>/g' infile

Ctrl-V allows for the entry of a control character. Follow it by pressing the tab key.

To prove it worked, redirect the output to a file, open it in vi, type the :set list command and you will see the tabs represented with "^I".

Another way to accomplish entering an actual TAB-character ( in bash / ksh93 ):

Code:

sed s/\|/$'\t'/g file