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?

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?

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 · So when doing IFS= read -r line, what you are doing is setting IFS to an empty string (no character will be used to split, therefore no splitting will occur) so that read will read the entire line …

Jul 9, 2021 · We change IFS and may forget to restore it We restore IFS every single iteration of the loop I discovered that while IFS=... can be used here like that: ... But this is not an option because …

Mar 19, 2021 · How do I correctly run a few commands with an altered value of the IFS variable (to change the way field splitting works and how "$*" is handled), and then restore the …

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 …

Mar 15, 2017 · If only there was a variable whose value is a space… Or more generally, contains a space. cat${IFS}file.txt The default value of IFS is space, tab, newline. All of these characters are …

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 syntax: a (possibly empty) sequence of …

1 As bash IFS does not provide an in-house way to treat consecutive delimiter chars as a single delimiter (for non-whitespace delimiters), I have put together an all bash version (vs.using an …