Re: how to replace tab by '\t' (literally) with tr?

[Andreas Schwab]

Peng Yu <address@hidden> writes:

> I have the following file head.txt. I'm wondering what the correct way
> is to change the tab to a backslash and the character 't'.
>
> $ tr "\t" "\\t" <head.txt

The tr utility can only change one character into another one, in a
one-to-one relationship, or remove selected characters.  Incidentally,
due to your use of double quotes this is a no-op ("\t" and "\\t" are the
same).

None of the utilities that are part of coreutils can do what you want,
but you can use sed, for example:

$ sed 's/\t/\\t/g' <head.txt

Andreas.

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Andreas Schwab, address@hidden
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