Re: Bug#95430 acknowledged by developer (Re: Bug#95430: ash: word-splitting changes break shell scripts)

[Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org>]

Zack Weinberg <zackw@Stanford.EDU> writes:

> Uh, no it can't.  I'm talking about self-contained shell scripts,
> not functions.  IFS does not inherit through the environment.
> Self-contained scripts can count on its being set to
> "<space><tab><newline>" when execution begins.

Says who?

SUS says:

    IFS

    Input field separators : a string treated as a list of characters
    that is used for field splitting and to split lines into words
    with the read command. See Field Splitting . If IFS is not set,
    the shell behaves as if the value of IFS were the space, tab and
    newline characters. Implementations may ignore the value of IFS in
    the environment at the time sh is invoked, treating IFS as if it
    were not set.

That seems to indicate that sh is not required to ignore IFS in the
environment.


-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
In specifications, Murphy's Law supersedes Ohm's.