title: Passing output of a Python script that contains tabs as argument in bash
body: <p>a school assignment is graded by printing an output from a Python script and passing it on as an argument to a small c program. Unfortunately the output string from python contains a tab, and bash recognizes it as two strings instead of one. How can I make it recognize as one string? Note that I cannot make modifications to the C program.</p>
  
  <p>a minimal example is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>#include &lt;stdio.h&gt;
  #include &lt;string.h&gt;
  
  int main(int argc, char **argv)
  {
      if (argc != 2) {
          puts("Fail!");
          return 1;
      }
      puts("Success!");
      return 0;
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And the output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$ ./a.out $(python -c 'print "\'a\tb\'"')
  Fail!
  </code></pre>