Re: IFS boundary behaviour is not consistent passing arguments to a function for bash 4.3 or 4.4 .

[Chet Ramey]

On 10/2/17 11:26 PM, McCue, Glenn (SSC/SPC) wrote:

> The IFS behaves differently depending on how the command is structured.
> This is my test script. It demonstrates the behavior change between 3.2  and 
> 4.[3|4].
> 
> The function "doit" lists the individual arguments that it has received.

More or less; you need to add quoting.

> The function "doit" is called twice,  each time setting  IFS. 
> 
> The first time the function is called the arguments to "doit" are just listed 
> in the function call.
> 
> The second time the function "doit" is called the arguments are concatenated 
> in a variable and the variable is used as the argument to the function.

It's clearer if you quote your variable references where you don't want
word splitting to happen ($argv1), but the basic change came between
bash-3.2 and bash-4.0, around January 2009. The bash-3.2 behavior was
incorrect.

IFS characters that aren't part of an expansion should not cause word
splitting. Bash-3.2 had a problem with `:', `=', and `~' (because of how
it did tilde expansion). If those characters are in $IFS, and they don't
result in tilde expansion, they should not cause word splitting.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/