Using sed to insert TABs

Question

I use this command:

sed -i "10 i \t\t\ttime.sleep(0.1) " /home/test_file

to insert at line 10 a line like: <TAB><TAB><TAB>sleep(0.1)

But I got

t<TAB><TAB>sleep(0.1)...

Can you tell me how to get this result? thanks

PS. I use this command in an executable bash script.

Answer 1

I believe the problem is with competition between the way that the shell and sed are expanding the meta-characters. I've tried tripling the first backslash character and that seems to work for me:

sed -i "i \\\t\t\ttime.sleep(0.1) " tmp.tmp