How do you type a tab in a bash here-document?

Question

The definition of a here-document is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_document

How can you type a tab in a here-document? Such as this:

cat > prices.txt << EOF coffee\t$1.50 tea\t$1.50 burger\t$5.00 EOF 

UPDATE:

Issues dealt with in this question:

1. Expanding the tab character
2. While not expanding the dollar sign
3. Embedding a here-doc in a file such as a script

Answer 1

TAB="$(printf '\t')"  cat > prices.txt << EOF coffee${TAB}\$1.50 tea${TAB}\$1.50 burger${TAB}\$5.00 EOF 

Answer 2

You can embed your here doc in your script and assign it to a variable without using a separate file at all:

#!/bin/bash read -r -d '' var<<"EOF" coffee\t$1.50 tea\t$1.50 burger\t$5.00 EOF 

Then printf or echo -e will expand the \t characters into tabs. You can output it to a file:

printf "%s\n" "$var" > prices.txt 

Or assign the variable's value to itself using printf -v:

printf -v var "%s\n" "$var" 

Now var or the file prices.txt contains actual tabs instead of \t.

You could process your here doc as it's read instead of storing it in a variable or writing it to a file:

while read -r item price do     printf "The price of %s is %s.\n" $item $price    # as a sentence     printf "%s\t%s\n" $item $price                  # as a tab-delimited line done <<- "EOF"     coffee $1.50    # I'm using spaces between fields in this case     tea $1.50     burger $5.00     EOF 

Note that I used <<- for the here doc operator in this case. This allows me to indent the lines of the here doc for readability. The indentation must consist of tabs only (no spaces).