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Re: how to replace tab by '\t' (literally) with tr?
From: |
Andreas Schwab |
Subject: |
Re: how to replace tab by '\t' (literally) with tr? |
Date: |
Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:51:53 +0100 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.1.90 (gnu/linux) |
Peng Yu <address@hidden> writes:
> I have the following file head.txt. I'm wondering what the correct way
> is to change the tab to a backslash and the character 't'.
>
> $ tr "\t" "\\t" <head.txt
The tr utility can only change one character into another one, in a
one-to-one relationship, or remove selected characters. Incidentally,
due to your use of double quotes this is a no-op ("\t" and "\\t" are the
same).
None of the utilities that are part of coreutils can do what you want,
but you can use sed, for example:
$ sed 's/\t/\\t/g' <head.txt
Andreas.
--
Andreas Schwab, address@hidden
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