IFS is confusing...

[sumbach]

I've always struggled with understanding the particulars of IFS and word splitting, so I'd like to try to give beginners as much help with this as possible.

1. I think the default value of IFS is space, tab, and newline.
2. It might be helpful to link to Word splitting in the Bash manual in case readers need the details.

[ghost]

Do you still find it confusing?

[sumbach]

@bucaran Yes, definitely 😖

The idea of IFS and word-splitting isn't too complicated or difficult to understand, but the particulars are very tricky.

I opened this issue to try to prompt a conversation about how IFS to explain/teach IFS. My personal inclination would be to recommend IFS="" then point people to particular solutions for common problems:

• BashFAQ/001: How can I read a file (data stream, variable) line-by-line (and/or field-by-field)?
• BashFAQ/005: How can I use array variables?
• BashFAQ/020: How can I find and safely handle file names containing newlines, spaces or both?
• BashFAQ/050: I'm trying to put a command in a variable, but the complex cases always fail!
• BashFAQ/067: How can I trim leading/trailing white space from one of my variables?
• BashFAQ/100: How do I do string manipulations in bash?