Re: bash vs. python scripts - which one is better?

[Bob McGowan <bob_mcgowan@symantec.com>]

Steven R. wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 07, 2007 at 04:03:05PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > So what's the right way to do this? I hacked one together the other
> > day:
> >
> > IFS=$'\t\n'; for i in `find . -iname \*m4a`; do faad... blah blah blah
> >
> > and I knew it was a hack because setting $IFS just seems
> > bad... possible unintended consquences, but it worked.
>
> I have seen something like the following:
>
> find | while read FILE;
> 	do echo "$FILE"
> done

I missed the original postings (on vacation;).  But, regarding IFS, a 
couple of notes:

  1.  In "The UNIX Programming Environment", Kernighan and Pike, this 
variable is used without any caveats, in several of the example scripts.

  2.  In all cases, the idiom used is:

         ifs=$IFS
         IFS='....' # whatever you need for your particular problem.
         ...        # your code
         IFS=$ifs
         ...        # any other processing that needs to be done

This guarantees that the original value, whatever it is, is restored and 
used for "normal" processing.

--
Bob McGowan

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