2009-03-16, 09:53(+01), Dave B:
> Stephane CHAZELAS wrote:
>
>> 2009-03-10, 15:43(-04), Chet Ramey:
>>>> What are the valid charactes for the IFS variable? In particular, is '\0'
>>>> a
>>>> valid one?
>>> Technically, yes, but in practice it's not useful. There are too many
>>> things
>>> represented as C strings to make NUL work right.
>> [...]
>>
>> And to answer the rest of the question. In bash, any character
>> except NUL is allowed in $IFS.
>>
>> Some points that should be noted:
>> - the SPC, TAB and NL characters are treated specially.
>> - contrary to in the Bourne shell, pdksh or zsh, IFS is an
>> internal field terminator, not separator ("a:b:" is split
>> into "a" and "b", not "a" and "b" and "" which makes it
>> inappropriate to split $PATH for instance) (in the Bourne
>> shell, it splits into "a" and "b" as well but that's because
>> empty elements are removed there)
>
> It looks like an empty word is created when the separator is at the
> beginning, but not when it's at the end (bash 3.2 and 4):
[...]
Yes, hence "internal field terminator" and not "internal field
introducer".
--
Stéphane
