Thanks for the explanation, but the quoted text does not mention whether IFS is or is not supposed to interpret escape sequence. If IFS is a string of characters, I guess most people will regard string "\t\n" as a two character string, the first one being <tab>, and the 2nd one being the <newline>.
On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Herbert Xu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, May 01, 2009 at 11:33:08AM -0700, Haibo Xu wrote: >> >> > #!/bin/sh >> > >> > IFS=$' \t\n' > > IFS is not supposed to interpret escape sequences. Quoting POSIX > > 1419 IFS (Input Field Separators.) A string > treated as a list of characters that is used for > 1420 field splitting and to split lines > into fields with the read command. If IFS is not > 1421 set, the shell shall behave as if > the value of IFS is <space>, <tab>, and > 1422 <newline>; see Section 2.6.5 (on > page 2244). Implementations may ignore the | > 1423 value of IFS in the environment at > the time the shell is invoked, treating IFS as | > 1424 if it were not set. > | > > So if you want it to have a tab and newline you need to specify > them literally, or use something that does interpret escapes, > like > > IFS=$(echo '\n\t $') > > Cheers, > -- > Visit Openswan at http://www.openswan.org/ > Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <[email protected]> > Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/ > PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe dash" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
