Feb 15, 2015 · At the beginning of a bash shell script is the following line: IFS=$'\\n' What is the meaning behind this collection of symbols?

Feb 20, 2023 · I was reading this Q&A: How to loop over the lines of a file? What is the IFS variable? And what is its usage in the context of for-loops?

The following few threads on this site and StackOverflow were helpful for understanding how IFS works: What is IFS in context of for looping? How to loop over the lines of a file Bash, read line by...

Jun 12, 2015 · Using IFS= LC_ALL=C read -r line works around it there. Using var=value cmd syntax makes sure IFS / LC_ALL are only set differently for the duration of that cmd command. History note …

Jul 9, 2021 · Here is an example of behavior I want to achieve: Suppose I have a list of lines, each line containing space separated values: lines='John Smith James Johnson' And I want to loop over lines …

Here if the expansion contains any IFS characters, then it split into different 'words' before the command is processed. Effectively this means that these characters split the substituted text into different …

If you have empty columns, cut -d$'\t' and IFS=$'\t' have different behaviour with regard to them. Cut will treat each individual tab as a distinct separator, while read will take consecutive tabs as just a single …

I know that a custom IFS value can be set for the scope of a single command/built-in. Is there a way to set a custom IFS value for a single statement?? Apparently not, since based on the below the ...

Apr 26, 2025 · ¹ Though note that it splits ::a:b::c::: into a, b and c only like IFS-splitting did in the Bourne shell (but not in modern Bourne-like shells except when space, tab or newline are used as separators).

Aug 16, 2020 · changing IFS temporarily before a for loop [duplicate] Ask Question Asked 5 years, 3 months ago Modified 4 years, 8 months ago