Question

I have a huge tab separated file which I want to sort on its 2nd column. I need to use the tab character as the field delimiter in cygwin sort. So I need something like this:

sort -t \t -k 2,2 in.txt > out.txt 

But the command prompt evaluates ‘\t’ literally and not as the tab character. Note that I need to do this on a Windows machine running Cygwin. Variations such as

sort -t '\t' sort -t \'\t\' 

don’t work, neither does putting this in a cmd file with an actual tab in place of the \t above.

Edit: A solution using either the DOS shell or the Cygwin bash shell is fine.

Answer 1

On my machine (Mac bash prompt, GNU sort …) this works:

sort -t '   ' -k 2,2 in.txt > out.txt 

(A "real" tab between the quotes.)

To get the tab there I type CTRL–V, TAB (CTRL–V followed by TAB).

EDIT: I’ve now tested it on a Windows machine from the cygwin prompt and it works the same there (as I expected, bash is bash).