Input Field Separators

For many command line interpreters (“shell”) of Unix operating systems, the input field separators variable (abbreviated IFS, and often referred to as internal field separators) refers to a variable which defines the character or characters used to separate a pattern into tokens for some operations. The value of IFS, which typically includes the space, tab, and the newline by default, can be printed with the command printf %q "$IFS" or cat -A <<< "$IFS" in Bash. From the Bash man page:

Input Field Separators

For many command line interpreters (“shell”) of Unix operating systems, the input field separators variable (abbreviated IFS, and often referred to as internal field separators) refers to a variable which defines the character or characters used to separate a pattern into tokens for some operations. The value of IFS, which typically includes the space, tab, and the newline by default, can be printed with the command printf %q "$IFS" or cat -A <<< "$IFS" in Bash. From the Bash man page: