> I want to be able to insert tab chars into the output lines eg > > sed = somefile | sed 'N;s/\n/\t/' > > just gives me the literal 't' immediately following the > number at the start > of each line. I haven't tried this in sed, but with "echo -e", you need to escape the backslash as well, so, assuming the rest of the statement is alright, try: sed = somefile | sed 'N;s/\n/\\t/' Cheers, Tobias