shell script help

[Kennels]

I've tried searching for this but can't find out why this doesn't work.

In a terminal directly when I use

join -t $'\t' file1 file2

this works fine, but when I add this to a bash script

#!/bin/bash

join -t $'\t' $1 $2

I get this error:
join: multi-character tab `$\\t'

I've tried various combinations of single/double quotes, without '$' , etc, but I can't seem to get this working within the script.
How can i specifiy a separator within bash script?
I'm using Ubuntu Linux.

[mknut]

This should work for bash:

#!/bin/bash
foo=1.txt
bar=2.txt
join -t "`echo -e '\t'`" $foo $bar >foobar.txt

1.txt:

1       abc
2       lmn
3       pqr

2.txt:

1       abc
3       lmn

foobar.txt:

1       abc     abc
3       pqr     lmn

[Kennels]

Thanks, it worked, but without the '-e' option for echo