Re: IFS

[nate () VIS ColoState EDU (Nate Sammons - CVL System Admin)]

Thus spake Paul Robinson:
> On Mon, 13 Feb 1995, Dave Williss wrote:
>
> > What is IFS, anyway?  I've seen it, but never anything to tell what it
> > is, what it does, what IFS stands for.
>
> Installable File System.  One of the uses is to, for example, put a large 
> disk on one machine and have many others share it so that it is 
> indistinguishable from a local disk if the link is fast enough.

I was under the impression that IFS was the Internal Field Separator.  It's a
variable in /bin/sh.  It was used before awk and perl were (mercifully)
invented so that you sould do easy splitting of strings.  It's usually set
to " " but you might set it to, say ":" if you were trying to peek at the
/etc/passwd file.  Read pages 153-154 in the ORA Practical Unix Security
book, it's really quite good (and interesting)

-nate

-- 
                   Nate Sammons <nate () vis colostate edu>
       System Administrator - CSU Computer Visualization Laboratory
               http://www.vis.colostate.edu/info/staff/nate