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 …

Jul 20, 2016 · The default value for IFS consists of whitespace characters (to be precise: space, tab and newline). Each character can be a word boundary. So, with the default value of IFS, …

Feb 20, 2023 · The default value of IFS is space, tab and newline, so if foo prints out two lines hello world and howdy then the loop body is executed with x=hello, then x=world and …

Jun 12, 2015 · IFS is the Input Field Separator, which means the string read will be split based on the characters in IFS. On a command line, IFS is normally any whitespace characters, that's …

Oct 26, 2018 · ifs=' ' which is equivalent but harder to read. BTW: This extension already has passed the POSIX standard commitee, but it is scheduled for SUSv8 that is expected to …

Aug 17, 2011 · The IFS= read -r line sets the environment variable IFS (to an empty value) specifically for the execution of read. This is an instance of the general simple command …

Oct 10, 2017 · In old versions of bash you had to quote variables after <<<.That was fixed in 4.4. In older versions, the variable would be split on IFS and the resulting words joined on space …

Mar 19, 2021 · An alternative way of doing this, suggested by LL3 in comments (now deleted), relies on prefixing the unset command by :, a built-in utility that does nothing, effectively …

Any character in IFS that is not IFS whitespace, along with any adjacent IFS whitespace characters, delimits a field. A sequence of IFS whitespace characters is also treated as a …

Nov 10, 2021 · IFS= and IFS=$'\n' are identical when it comes to read (assuming the read delimiter is not changed from the default), since the only difference is whether a newline inside …