On Mon, Jan 13, 2025 at 08:42:39 +0700, Robert Elz wrote: > It is unexpected, because users believe (from other experience) > that the delimiters separate fields, but in sh they don't, they > terminate fields.
At the risk of going a bit off topic, may I ask *why* the shell does that? Were there any files or data stream conventions in common use in the 1970s that would have prompted that design decision? Files like /etc/group and /etc/passwd certainly don't conform to that data format, so the sh behavior definitely didn't arise from either of those. The only realistic example I can think of would be something like printf '%s\0' "$@" to serialize the positional parameters into a stream of NUL-terminated C strings. But the Bourne shell doesn't have the means of reading such a stream (it has no read -d '', and you certainly can't use NUL as an IFS character), so I don't think that was what Mr. Bourne had in mind either. (Not to mention, the Bourne shell didn't have printf either.) It just feels like the shell is trying to do a job that nobody actually wants done.
