Re: Join separator field

[Eric Blake]

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The fact that you mailed the obsolete bug-textutils instead of the current
bug-coreutils makes me think that your installation is out of date.  The
current stable version of coreutils is 5.93.  You should consider
upgrading your installation (since you mentioned cygwin, you may also want
to consider asking the cygwin AT cygwin DOT com mailing list for help in
your upgrade process).

According to Samuel GRANJEAUD on 1/11/2006 9:09 AM:
> I am pround to use join for doing bioinformatics up to now. But when I
> wanted to separate field by tab character, I failed. May be it's a bug...
> 
> bash-3.00$ join -j 1 -t \011 aa.txt bb.txt  > cc.txt

You didn't quote the backslash, so join was behaving as if it were called
with "join -j 1 -t 011 aa.text bb.txt".  Had you really wanted joint to
see \011, you should have used "-t '\011'".  But even then, older versions
of join just silently used the first character (giving the effect of -t
0), and 5.93 now complains when multiple characters are present:
join: multi-character tab `011'.

What you really wanted to do to use a literal tab on the command line
(since join 5.93 only understands \0; it does not understand \t or \011),
so that join sees only a single character.  This can be done using the key
combination [ctrl-v][tab] in an interactive bash shell, or by using a
literal tab in a script file, or by using another program to generate the
tab for you, like so:

$ join -j 1 -t "`printf '\t'`" aa.txt bb.txt > cc.txt

Meanwhile, a patch that allows join to parse the same escape sequences as
printf would probably be welcomed.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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