For many command line interpreters (โshellโ) 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, typically includes the space, tab, and the newline by default. These whitespace characters can be visualized by printing IFS with commands like printf %s "$IFS" | od -c, printf "%q\n" "$IFS" or printf %s "$IFS" | cat -A (the latter two commands being only available in some shells and on some systems).
From the Bash man page:
The shell treats each character of $IFS as a delimiter, and splits the results of the other expansions into words on these characters.If IFS is unset, or its value is exactly <space><tab><newline>, the default, then sequences of <space>, <tab>, and <newline> at the beginning and end of the results of the previous expansions are ignored, and any sequence of IFS characters not at the beginning or end serves to delimit words.If IFS has a value other than the default, then sequences of the whitespace characters space and tab are ignored at the beginning and end of the word, as long as the whitespace character is in the value of IFS (an IFS whitespace character).Any character in IFS that is not IFS whitespace, along with any adjacent IFS whitespace characters, delimits a field. A sequence of IFS whitespace characters is also treated as a delimiter. If the value of IFS is null, no word splitting occurs.
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