Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going through the AWK book and join is in there. I was unhappily surprised to find that using a tab as a delimiter is painful with join. Variations to overcome this which I've bumped into: join -t $'\t' file1 file2 (BASH only, I think.) join -t ' ' file1 file2 join -t "`echo '\t'`" file1 file2 Why 'join -t '\t' file1 file2' is apparently beyond the pale has me mystified.
See https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/65819/5132 for some thinking on making every individual program have an escape sequence parser, and why that syntax is not specific nor original to the Bourne Again shell.
Found a link in your link to something by a Sven Mascheck and found out there is a printf command. Despite having started using Linux in 1997, I still find new things.