unix join separator char

Question

Sorry for the maybe trivial question.

I fought a bit with the unix join command, trying to get tabs instead of whitespaces as the default separators. -t is

Answer 1

An alternate trick that seems to work is to enclose the -t option in quotes with the literal tab character. This looks like:

join '-t    ' ...

with a variable space between the t and the closing quote (since it's a tab).

Typed, it's:

join'-t' ...