Re: [coreutils] seq: Add the ability to process escape characters

[Jim Meyering]

William Plusnick wrote:
> When I was looking at seq I noticed it did not process escape character in the
> separator string. This renders it nearly impossible to separate the numbers by
> tabs in Bash because when you hit the tab key it tries to autofill and doesn't
> add the tab in directly. A more concrete example of this is:
> $ seq -s"\t" 3
> 1\t2\t3
> $ seq -s" <HITS TAB KEY>
> DIRECTORY LISTING
>
> How would you feel about me adding a function that will interpret the escape
> characters?

Not needed, since you can do this e.g., with bash and zsh:

$ seq -s$'\t' 3
1       2       3

Or, more portably,

    seq -s"`printf '\t'`" 3