While it's true that you'll have misses on tabs in filenames, it's much more rare to have a tab in a filename than it is to have a space, yes? There is no loss on a single quote character. You're quoting the command line argument. On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 4:35 PM, erik quanstrom wrote: > On Mon Dec 28 18:32:36 EST 2009, don.bailey@gmail.com wrote: > > > du -a | awk '-F\t' '{print $2}' - > > > > lossage on tabs and ' in filenames. > > - erik > >