ls gets confused by IFS environment variable

[Elmar Stellnberger]

LS gets confused as soon as the IFS environment variable only contains
control characters.

# IFS contains an NL only:
 bash
 IFS=$(echo -e \n)
 ls
/bin/ls: Ungültige Option --
„/bin/ls --help“ gibt weitere Informationen.

# IFS contains TAB,NL and SPACE:
 IFS=$(echo -e  \t\n)
 ls -1
bin
boot
dev
...

Strange! There is also nothing about IFS in the man or info pages of ls.
Why has IFS an influence on ls at all?



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[Fwd: ls gets confused by IFS environment variable]

[Elmar Stellnberger]

coreutils-5.93-20


---BeginMessage---
LS gets confused as soon as the IFS environment variable only contains
control characters.

# IFS contains an NL only:
 bash
 IFS=$(echo -e \n)
 ls
/bin/ls: Ungültige Option --
„/bin/ls --help“ gibt weitere Informationen.

# IFS contains TAB,NL and SPACE:
 IFS=$(echo -e  \t\n)
 ls -1
bin
boot
dev
...

Strange! There is also nothing about IFS in the man or info pages of ls.
Why has IFS an influence on ls at all?


---End Message---
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Re: ls gets confused by IFS environment variable

[Andreas Schwab]

Elmar Stellnberger [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 LS gets confused as soon as the IFS environment variable only contains
 control characters.

The ls program does not use the IFS environment variable in any way.

 # IFS contains an NL only:
 bash
 IFS=$(echo -e \n)
 ls
 /bin/ls: Ungültige Option --
 „/bin/ls --help“ gibt weitere Informationen.

Try running /bin/ls directly, you problably have a shell alias or function
with the name `ls', which depends on proper word splitting.

 Why has IFS an influence on ls at all?

It hasn't.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
PGP key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
And now for something completely different.


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