Issue

It is often necessary to replace delimiters in a file with a form the receiving party expects. sed is my favorite method of meeting the need.

Solution

Replace double pipes with tabs

sed 's/||/           /g' file.in > file.out

Note: If you find the tab key simply does not work, try CTRL+V+I from your terminal.

Reference

http://forums.devshed.com/unix-help-35/replacing-tabs-with-spaces-372623.html

Caveats

Special consideration (and a regex) will be required for data where delimiters are present in the data itself. Consider your use case and apply appropriately.