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

man join says, that the options have to come in front of the filenames. Have you tried

join -t "\t" file1 file2

?

Edit: Reflecting Tonio's answer, the correct line would read

join -t $'\t' file1 file2