Hosted by Ken Fallon on 2011-08-08 is flagged as Explicit and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Listen in ogg, spx, or mp3 format. | Comments (1)
for more information see http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/tab-in-bash-script-242400/#post4386714
Another way you can do this would be use the special $'string' expansion which is treated specially and expands string with backslash-escaped characters replaced as specified by the ANSI C standard (see under QUOTING of the bash(1) man page for more info).
You could therefore do something like this:
grep "first"$'\t'"second" file.txt
This is also REALLY useful for weird characters (it supports \nnn, \U (unicode)) etc and the like.