How do I convert a tab-separated values (TSV) file to a comma-separated values (CSV) file in BASH?

Question

I have some TSV files that I need to convert to CSV files. Is there any solution in BASH, e.g. using awk, to convert these? I could use sed, like this,

Answer 1

This can also be achieved with Perl:

In order to pipe the results to a new output file you can use the following:
perl -wnlp -e 's/\t/,/g;' input_file.tsv > output_file.csv

If you'd like to edit the file in place, you can invoke the -i option:
perl -wnlpi -e 's/\t/,/g;' input_file.txt

If by some chance you find that what you are dealing with is not actually tabs, but instead multiple spaces, you can use the following to replace each occurrence of two or more spaces with a comma:
perl -wnlpi -e 's/\s+/,/g;' input_file

Keep in mind that \s represents any whitespace character, including spaces, tabs or newlines and cannot be used in the replacement string.