Echo tab characters in bash script

Question

How do I echo one or more tab characters using a bash script? When I run this code

res=\'       \'x # res = \"\\t\\tx\"
echo \'[\'$res\']\' # expect [\\t\\tx         


        

Answer 1

you need to use -e flag for echo then you can

echo -e "\t\t x"

Answer 2

echo -e ' \t '

will echo 'space tab space newline' (-e means 'enable interpretation of backslash escapes'):

$ echo -e ' \t ' | hexdump -C
00000000  20 09 20 0a                                       | . .|

Answer 3

Using echo to print values of variables is a common Bash pitfall. Reference link:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls#echo_.24foo

Answer 4

From the bash man page:

Words of the form $'string' are treated specially. The word expands to string, with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard.

So you can do this:

echo $'hello\tworld'