Paste  into Mac OS X command line
You can insert a literal tab by pressing Ctrl-v (quoted-insert) and tab.

You can insert tabs in strings with $'\t':

cut -f2 &lt;&lt;&lt; $'aa\tbb'


Or use pbpaste:

pbpaste | cut -f2


This makes tab just insert a tab:

bind '"\t": self-insert'


If you use option as meta, adding this to ~/.inputrc would make ⌥⇥ insert a tab:

"\e\t": "\C-v\t"