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Showing posts with label bash scripting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bash scripting. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

IFS Internal Field Separator in Bash Scripting

IFS stands for  Internal Field Separator - it's a character that separate fields. In the example you posted it is set to new line character (\n), so after setting it for will process text line by line. In that example you could change value of $IFS (to some letter that you have in your input file) and check how text will be splitted.

 

[root@ip-192-168-1-36 tmp]# for i in `cat sample.txt`; do echo $i; done
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[root@ip-192-168-1-36 tmp]# IFS=$' '
[root@ip-192-168-1-36 tmp]# for i in `cat sample.txt`; do echo $i; done

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[root@ip-192-168-1-36 tmp]# IFS=$'\n'
[root@ip-192-168-1-36 tmp]# for i in `cat sample.txt`; do echo $i; done
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[root@ip-192-168-1-36 tmp]#