-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The fact that you mailed the obsolete bug-textutils instead of the current bug-coreutils makes me think that your installation is out of date. The current stable version of coreutils is 5.93. You should consider upgrading your installation (since you mentioned cygwin, you may also want to consider asking the cygwin AT cygwin DOT com mailing list for help in your upgrade process).
According to Samuel GRANJEAUD on 1/11/2006 9:09 AM: > I am pround to use join for doing bioinformatics up to now. But when I > wanted to separate field by tab character, I failed. May be it's a bug... > > bash-3.00$ join -j 1 -t \011 aa.txt bb.txt > cc.txt You didn't quote the backslash, so join was behaving as if it were called with "join -j 1 -t 011 aa.text bb.txt". Had you really wanted joint to see \011, you should have used "-t '\011'". But even then, older versions of join just silently used the first character (giving the effect of -t 0), and 5.93 now complains when multiple characters are present: join: multi-character tab `011'. What you really wanted to do to use a literal tab on the command line (since join 5.93 only understands \0; it does not understand \t or \011), so that join sees only a single character. This can be done using the key combination [ctrl-v][tab] in an interactive bash shell, or by using a literal tab in a script file, or by using another program to generate the tab for you, like so: $ join -j 1 -t "`printf '\t'`" aa.txt bb.txt > cc.txt Meanwhile, a patch that allows join to parse the same escape sequences as printf would probably be welcomed. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDx7Is84KuGfSFAYARAmQ2AJ9SbHFBu280vz8SN6N9U+FMe9LFLwCfQlGt RX7sWYXw1iMRYUAFr7cyf/g= =+FuH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils