osx - How to enter a tab char on command line? - Stack Overflow

I use sed regularly to convert some of the tab delimited files to csv files so that I can work with it in excel 

I was surprised to find my usual commands not working turns out  that '\t' doesn't work in MacOS terminal you have to do 

[Control] + [V], followed by [Tab]




source:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6392249/how-to-enter-a-tab-char-on-command-line