Peter Memishian wrote:
>  > Please explain why using a whitespace character such as tab as the
>  > delimiter is unworkable.
>
> Because most shells will consolidate multiple consecutive whitespace
> fields into a single field.  Blank fields become unworkable.
>
>  > My definition of parsable input means I can write a script like
>  > this in sh:
>  > 
>  > dladm -o state,over | while read a b; do
>  >     echo "a=$a,b=$b"
>  > done
>
> That works, just set IFS=|
>   

Yes, and maybe you'd like to provide a complete example so that
it can be compared with the simplicity of what I presented above.

Darren


Reply via email to