awk not behaving with qsub

I am trying to run a command which is something like this intersectBed -a yeast.v2.bed -b cov.txt -wa -wb | awk -v OFS="\t" '{print $7,$8,$9,$6,$11,$10}' > out.txt out.txt looks like this chrI 151006 151096 0 chrI 142253 142619 53 chrI 87387 87500 8 I am working on the cluster and when I qsub the above command(that is submitting to the cluster) I get the out.txt file like this chrIt151006t151096t0 chrIt142253t142619t53 chrIt87387t87500t8 The command line I am using with qsub is this: qsub -l h_vmem=4G -cwd -j y -b y -N test "intersectBed -a yeast.v2.bed -b cov.txt -wa -wb | awk -v OFS="\t" '{print \$7,\$8,\$9,\$6,\$11,\$10}' > out.txt" As you can see I have to escape each column($) with back slash so that shell does not consider it as its on variable. But some how tab does not work. Can anyone tell me what is going on here. Of course I can use sed 's/t/\t/g' after the awk command but I need to understand what is going on here and why does it not work. Thanks in advance