Subject: Re: Grep for tab character
From: Brian Dessent <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 23:29:48 -0800

Robert Mark Bram wrote:

> > How about just using the actual tab character?  I don't see any
> > indication that
> > grep is supposed to treat '\t' specially and it seems to behave that way
> > on linux,
> > too.
> 
> I have read in many places that \t is a metacharacter for tab in regular
> expressions - but maybe that's only for sed, perl, awk etc...
> http://sitescooper.org/tao_regexps.html

Try "grep -P '\t'" to use perl-compatible regexps.  Note that this is a
specific capability of GNU grep, so it will not be portable to systems
that use a different grep.  It might be more portable to use "awk
'/\t/'".

Or <ctrl-v><tab> to insert a literal tab as others said.

Brian

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