There are things I do fairly often, but not often enough to actually remember how. One such is sorting a file with tab-delimited fields. I always expect to be able to do this:
sort -t"\t" -k3 ...
but that doesn’t work. The shell does not recognise “\t” as tab.
For future reference, a workaround is to use a perl wrapper:
perl -we 'print `sort -t"\t" -k3 ...`'
which works because perl substitutes a tab for \t
Tis all Greek to me