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.
Best Answer
On my machine (Mac bash prompt, GNU sort ...) this works:
(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).