tabulator character and column command

In the bash escape sequences can be interpreted in a string with prepended dollar and single quotes:

echo $'one\ttwo'

the tabulator character seperates table cells better then spaces or semicolons

TSV is better CSV. If you have to deal with excel on window use a tab seperated csv file in UTF-16 with byte order mark.

Editors have a tabstop in spaces or inch in the case of ms word.

The unix command column calculates the neede tabstop over all rows and displays the data nicely formated:

mysql -u root -pxxxxxx -B -e "select * from customer;" mydatabase | column -t -s $'\t'

As can be seen here this is handy for mysql because it seperates table cells with tabs with the shell client

the mount command uses only a space to seperate data, but can be also formated nicely as a table:

mount | column -t -s " "