internal field separators

internal field separators

(operating system)($IFS) A predefined environment variablein the Unix Bourne shell whose default value is thethree-character string containing space, tab and line feed. Any string of one or more of these charactersseparates the command and each of its arguments in a commandline.

$IFS also tells the shell's built-in read command where tosplit an input line when reading into multiple variables.E.g. setting IFS=: would be appropriate for reading a filewith ':'-separated fields, such as /etc/passwd.