Re: sort does not use tab as delimiter

[Paul Eggert]

DI Oliver Maurhart <address@hidden> writes:

> Yes, it does, but this "feature" is pain ass to enter on a bash-shell:

Absolutely.  And this bothers me in many respects, not just
with sort -t.  Perhaps you should be directing your bug
reports to the Bash maintainer.  After all, in this
particular context (and in the other contexts I'm thinking
of) it should be perfectly obvious to Bash that the user
just wanted to type a tab.

Under M-x shell in my Emacs installation (Debian stable),
Bash is even worse: it loses the tab entirely.  I haven't
had time to fix this either.  But perhaps someone with some
more time (you, perhaps?) can get it fixed.

If this were fixed with Bash, that would improve the
situation for many programs, not just 'sort'.

> 3. Is there any good reason, why sort does not use very common whitspace
> symbols like many other do?

It's mainly because nobody has had the time to implement it
cleanly yet.  This includes the patch you proposed, which
supports only \t and which does not update the
documentation.