Re: [Help-bash] IFS & read

[Greg Wooledge]

On Sat, May 26, 2012 at 02:24:42PM -0500, Dan Douglas wrote:
> On Saturday, May 26, 2012 12:56:31 PM Bill Gradwohl wrote:
> > I converted that file by replacing the tab character with \b and changed
> > the IFS to match and now I don't get field separation.
> > 
> > I also tried \x00 and \x01 and they don't work either.
> 
> You can't put a NUL byte into a variable. Don't know about your \x01 case.

I think there may be bugs in some versions of bash with the handling of
\x01 in some contexts.  But I don't know of any reason backspace would
fail.

Still, I think the most likely explanation is that Bill didn't set IFS
correctly (maybe he did IFS='\x01' instead of IFS=$'\x01' which is a
really easy thing to screw up... I just screwed it up myself, in fact).