How can I put tabs in text files from Terminal? [closed]

Question

When I use Terminal to find every job that has been worked on last twenty-four hours I get a text file with lines like this:

ABC 12345 Job Worked on DATE

DEF 67890 Another Job on DATE

GHI 10112 Final Job on DATE

This text file can be up to hundred lines. I have to insert all this data into a tabel in Microsoft Excel. To make my life easier I would like to figure out how to add a tab in every line, after the numbers.

Something like this:

echo "ABC 12345 <tab> Job Worked on DATE" >> jobs.txt
echo "DEF 67890 <tab> Another Job on DATE" >> jobs.txt
echo "GHI 10112 <tab> Final Job on DATE" >> jobs.txt

How would I achieve this?

Answer 1

Use echo -e with \t for a tab. Like this:

echo -e "ABC 12345 \t Job Worked on DATE" >> jobs.txt

Answer 2

You can press Ctrl-vTab to type a raw Tab.

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You can also use $'...' c-string syntax:

echo $'ABC 12345 \t Job Worked on DATE' >> jobs.txt