Sorting a tab delimited file
问题 I have a data with the following format: foo<tab>1.00<space>1.33<space>2.00<tab>3 Now I tried to sort the file based on the last field decreasingly. I tried the following commands but it wasn\'t sorted as we expected. $ sort -k3nr file.txt # apparently this sort by space as delimiter $ sort -t\"\\t\" -k3nr file.txt sort: multi-character tab `\\\\t\' $ sort -t \"`/bin/echo \'\\t\'`\" -k3,3nr file.txt sort: multi-character tab `\\\\t\' What\'s the right way to do it? Here is the sample data.