Literal tab character on the command line on Linux BASH

Posted September 23rd, 2011 in Linux/Unix/BSD and Quick Tips

So you need to put a tab on the command line when using BASH on Linux, Mac, BSD? How to do it? The tab character is usually used for command completion etc so typing in a tab won't render one on the command line.

Ctrl+V then TAB

Use Ctrl+V (or Control+V on a Mac) and then the tab key.

That will put a literal tab on the command line, which can be useful if (like me) you need to grep for a single character in a field in a tab delimited text file.