how to tab separate variables in unix

Question

I have 2 variable :$table and $i

table=test
i=1

when i try to separate these two variables with tab with the below command:

echo "$table\t$i\tSuccess" > success.txt

The output is

 test\ti

The desired output is

test    1

Appreciate valuable suggestions.

See this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10576571/how-to-make-echo-interpret-backslash-escapes-and-not-print-a-trailing-newline — codeforester, Jan 12 '17 at 20:13

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Jan 12 '17 at 07:11

5

Use printf:

printf "%s\t%s\tSuccess\n" "$table" "$i" > success.txt

or echo -e (the -e flag enables interpretation of the backslash-escaped characters):

 echo -e "$table\t$i\tSuccess" > success.txt

edited Jan 12 '17 at 07:11

Inian

answered Jan 12 '17 at 06:34

William Pursell

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 17 '17 at 12:39

1

You can write a tab in Bash as $'\t'.

What I do in my scripts is create a constant. The tab itself is not special: once you have it in a variable, you can use it the normal way.

readonly tab=$'\t'
echo "$table$tab$i${tab}Success" > success.txt

answered Jan 17 '17 at 12:39

Fred

2 Answers2