Linear TSV is a line-oriented, portable tabular data format. Tabular data --
rows of tuples, each of the same length -- is commonly stored as CSV and is the
lingua franca of spreadsheets, databases and analysis tools.

CSV is almost but not quite line-oriented, because newlines are quoted, not
escaped. In the TSV format presented here, escape codes are used for newlines
and tabs in field data, allowing naive filtering with line-oriented shell tools
like sort, fgrep and cut to work as expected. In all of its details, the format
derives from the TEXT serialization mode of Postgres and MySQL.