Search for tabs, without -P, using 'grep'

Question

I used to use grep -P successfully earlier, till I got a machine where grep is not compiled with Perl regular expression support. Now I am having trouble matching tabs: \t character,

grep -G '\t' matches a literal 't'
grep -E '\t' matches a literal 't'

How do I match tabs?

Answer 1

Try this instead:

grep -G $'\t'

For more info please see bug #23535: Grep Doesn't Support \t as a tab character.