Hi, It appears that one can't specify just a tab (a tab and only a tab) as sort's field-separator. As shown below, the UNIX example does it right whereas the Linux example fails.
Is this a bug/limitation or did I miss the correct way to do this? I can work around this in bash using: TAB=`echo -e "\t"` sort -t"$TAB" ... but this trick doesn't work with tcsh using: setenv TAB `/bin/echo -e "\t"` Must be the different way expressions are expanded with quotes in the two shells. Jim $ cat /tmp/x 2 x, a1 2 x, b 1 x, a2 NB: Each line consists of <digit><tab>x,<space><letter><optionaldigit> *** RH 7.2, textutils-2.0.14-2 $ sort -t'\t' -u -k2,2 -k1,1 /tmp/x sort: multi-character tab `\t' *** Compaq Tru64 UNIX V5.1 (Rev. 732) % sort -t'\t' -u -k2,2 -k1,1 /tmp/x 2 x, a1 1 x, a2 2 x, b *** _______________________________________________ Bug-textutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-textutils