[Help-bash] How to split fields like awk with FS="\t"? (read)

[Peng Yu]

Hi, The following code shows that continuos TAB is treated as single
field separator as explained in "Word Splitting". But such a
definition is none intuitive. Sometime people what to treat each TAB
as a separator. Is there a way to do so in bash? Thanks.

IFS=$'\t' read -r -d $'\n' v x y z < <(printf "%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n" a b '' c)
echo $v
echo $x
echo $y
echo $z

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Regards,
Peng