IFS: Characters to separate fields

The shell uses each character of the IFS variable as a separator during word splitting.

Links

• IFS in the Bash manual
• POSIX specification on field splitting
• Advanced Bash–Scripting Guide: $IFS
• Advanced Bash–Scripting Guide: $IFS and whitespace
• Advanced Bash–Scripting Guide: $* and $@ when $IFS is empty
• Wikipedia: Internal field separator

Examples

IFS to split a word

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var1="a+b+c"
IFS=+
echo $var1