On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 04:27:37PM +0000, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
>
> How can it do anything without IFS? Do you mean that the variable
> is not set, but the shell behaves as if it had a sensible whitespace
> default?
IFS (Input Field Separators.) A string treated as a list of characters
that is used for field splitting and to split lines into fields
with the read command. If IFS is not set, the shell shall behave
as if the value of IFS is <space>, <tab>, and <newline>; see Field
Splitting. Implementations may ignore the value of IFS in the
environment at the time the shell is invoked, treating IFS as if
it were not set.
