Bash Internal variables $IFS
Example
Contains the Internal Field Separator string that bash uses to split strings when looping etc. The default is the white space characters: \n (newline), \t (tab) and space. Changing this to something else allows you to split strings using different characters:
IFS=","
INPUTSTR="a,b,c,d"
for field in ${INPUTSTR}; do
echo $field
done
The output of the above is:
a
b
c
d
Notes:
- This is responsible for the phenomenon known as word splitting.
