Display TAB in Shell Script

The problem is that you are passing the value of your delimiter to an input (<<) statement, as part of your database statement. The string passed via (<<) is being sent literally, as you have typed it.

So, in your example, the value of "${TAB}" is expanded literally, so that you are actually passing "\t" as the delimiter, and not a tab character as you expect.

You say you would like to do this in case the delimiter changes in a later iteration, which is commendable when you are writing a generic script, but since your script uses 'drop table', which is an aggressive and job-specific task, I wouldn't bother trying to genericise the script, just type the tab in place.

If you really want a generic script, you should at least:

1) Move the database instructions to an external file, passed to the script either as stdin, or as a named file parameter, or as an editable constant like you have with TAB

2) Instead of varying the value you pass to SET RECORD VARTEXT, you should always use the same delimiter, and instead pass the input file through a sed command to bring it into the format required by the script, by replacing the delimiter for that file with the delimiter enforced by the script.

However, if you insist on doing it this way, pretending to have a generic script, you can achieve this in a number of ways:

A) By breaking down the "<<" statement into three steps:

#step 1
fastload << EOT1
${LOGON}
DROP TABLE ${DATABASE}.${TABLE}_Err1;
DROP TABLE ${DATABASE}.${TABLE}_Err2;
ERRLIMIT 50;

BEGIN LOADING
${DATABASE}.${TABLE}
   ERRORFILES ${DATABASE}.${TABLE}_Err1,
              ${DATABASE}.${TABLE}_Err2
   CHECKPOINT 100000;

SET RECORD VARTEXT
EOT1

# step 2
fastload << $TAB

# step 3
fastload << EOT2
;
DEFINE
     Col1       (VARCHAR(5))
     ,col2     (VARCHAR(2))
     ,col3      (VARCHAR(12))

EOT2


B) By removing the quotes.  Note that the syntax ${..} implies a quote itself, so you are essentially passing ""\t"".  Anyway, just try replacing "${TAB}" with $TAB and see if that works.  If it doesn't, you need to split the << input so that the TAB is passed outside of any other string.