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] 

I get this

res=[ x] # that is [<space>x] 

Answer 1

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                                       | . .|