Redirection is all that is needed to create a CSV file in a bash shell script. In this example, a CSV file named example.csv is created, and the text Hello World will be in cell A1 of the CSV file.

~]# echo "Hello World" > example.csv

Comma separate

The data in a CSV file is often separated by a comma. Simply placing a comma between Hello and World will separated the data with a comma so that the data is in unique cells.

~]# echo "Hello,World" > example.csv

Or, to do the same in a bash script.

#!/bin/bash

foo="Hello"
bar="World"

echo $foo,$bar > example.csv

Let's say you want data in the cells to be separated by a new line.

This trick is simply to place double quotes around the data being passed to the CSV file.

#!/bin/bash

foo="Line 1
Line 2
Line 3"

echo "$foo" > example.csv

Tab separate

The column command can be used to create a tab separated CSV file. In this example, the data in the example.csv file is comma separated, and then a new CSV file named tab.csv is created.

~]# column -t example.csv > tab.csv