Tab separated values in awk

Use:

awk -v FS='\t' -v OFS='\t' ...

---

Example from one of my scripts.

I use the FS and OFS variables to manipulate BIND zone files, which are tab delimited:

awk -v FS='\t' -v OFS='\t' \
    -v record_type=$record_type \
    -v hostname=$hostname \
    -v ip_address=$ip_address '
$1==hostname && $3==record_type {$4=ip_address}
{print}
' $zone_file > $temp

This is a clean and easy to read way to do this.

You need to set the OFS variable (output field separator) to be a tab:

echo "$line" | 
awk -v var="$mycol_new" -F'\t' 'BEGIN {OFS = FS} {$3 = var; print}'

(make sure you quote the $line variable in the echo statement)

Make sure they're really tabs! In bash, you can insert a tab using C-v TAB

$ echo "LOAD_SETTLED    LOAD_INIT       2011-01-13 03:50:01" | awk -F$'\t' '{print $1}'
LOAD_SETTLED