When you run sqlcmd with -s"\t", it does not interpret \t as a tab character

Question

I run the following tsql with sqlcmd but output does not get formatted with Tabs

sqlcmd -S SQL2K12 -d Admin -E -s"\t" -W -Q "SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_TYPE='BASE TABLE' AND TABLE_SCHEMA='dbo' ORDER BY TABLE_NAME;"

Output:

TABLE_CATALOG\TABLE_SCHEMA\TABLE_NAME\TABLE_TYPE --------------------------------------------- Admin\dbo\Account\BASE TABLE Admin\dbo\AdminUser\BASE TABLE Admin\dbo\ArchiveUtilityChanges\BASE TABLE Admin\dbo\Audit_ByTrigger_Components\BASE TABLE Admin\dbo\Audit_ByTrigger_ComponentsDeleted\BASE TABLE Admin\dbo\BigTable\BASE TABLE Admin\dbo\BlitzWho\BASE TABLE Admin\dbo\BTSHealthStat\BASE TABLE .......... ..........

When asking Copilot, It suggested to use, in powershell a different delimiter and convert to tabs as follows

 .\sqlcmd -S SQL2K12 -d Admin -E -s"|" -W -Q "SELECT TABLE_SCHEMA, TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_TYPE='BASE TABLE' AND TABLE_SCHEMA='dbo' ORDER BY TABLE_NAME;" |  ForEach-Object { $_ -replace '\|', "`t" }

which worked fine.

So the question is why -s"\t" does not get interpreted correctly? Thanks

Answer 1

AFAIK, The -s switch takes the delimiter literally. So -s"\t" means backslash + t, not an actual tab character. "\t" in PowerShell is just the characters \ and t. PowerShell's escape for a tab is "`t" (backtick-t), not backslash-t.

The workaround with | worked because you forced a delimiter that both PowerShell and sqlcmd can reliably treat as plain text (|), then replaced it with a real tab using PowerShell’s "t"` escape, which is interpreted as a tab.

Try the following

sqlcmd -S SQL2K12 -d Admin -E -s "`t" -W -Q "SELECT ...;"

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hth

Marcin