| Akim Demaille <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote
| 16 Mar 2000 19:16:48 +0100:
|
| In fact if someone has broken IFS, typically lacking nl, then the
| sanity check from Automake will fail, telling the there is a severe
| clock skew, while it's only the
|
| set X `ls -Lt $srcdir/configure conftestfile 2> /dev/null`
|
| which is improperly split (ls will answer separating with nl, not
| spaces).
|
| FreeBSD sh says that
|
| * Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one. When
| the expansion occurs within a double-quoted string it expands to
| a single field with the value of each parameter separated by the
| first character of the IFS variable, or by a <space> if IFS is
| unset.
|
| So with IFS=<nl><space><tab> we get the behaviour you mention.
Different IFS is what I meant by broken IFS.
| I haven't followed this thread very closely, so forgive me if this is
| a silly question but is the order crucial? Couldn't we have
| IFS=<space><tab><nl> instead?
I preferred the former order because so that the white chars are never
last on the line.
IFS="
"
is more explicit than
IFS="
"
(unless your mailer shows the white spaces :).
Akim
