Bash Built-In Variables

Internal

• bash Concepts

Standard Environment Variables

List Separator

The default list separator is space. That can be changed by setting the value of the IFS variable before executing set.

Example:

arg="a,b,c"
IFS=","
set ${arg}

will identically assign "a", "b", "c" to positional parameters $1, $2 and $3.

Note you must set IFS back to " " after setting it to something else, so the basic shell function work as expected. This is done with IFS=" ".