Bash: echo a tab
When you’re scripting, you sometimes want nice ‘human readable’ results. Luckily, Bash’s echo command has some formatting tools.
Say you are printing a table, and want the columns separated by tabs:
n nuppi tati 1 0.23 0.001 2 0.22 0.004 3 0.20 0.005 ...
Simply echo it like this:
echo -e n \\t nuppi \\t tati ... etc
You need the additional escape character (‘\’) in front of the standard tab-character \t, otherwise bash will think it is just a ‘t’.
A similar command in awk:
print n "\t" nuppi "\t" tati;
References:
http://ss64.com/bash/echo.html