Stahlman Family wrote: > I guess the question is, what is meant by "delimits a field" in the > following excerpt from the Bash manual? > > "Any character in IFS that is not IFS whitespace, along with any > adjacent IFS whitespace characters, delimits a field." > > I suppose I'm interpreting it to mean "separates fields". It occurred to > me that perhaps it means "terminates a field". The problem with that > definition, however, is that if I add any single character after the > final '|' in the example above, string_extract_verbatim will extract a > final field, which is not terminated by anything in IFS, but simply by > the end of the string. In that case, the final IFS delimiter is > separating the final two fields. The bottom line is that since the Bash > manual does not appear to distinguish between the cases of leading and > trailing null fields, it appears that an arbitrary design choice > determines that leading null fields are kept, and trailing ones are not.
The Posix committee has debated this issue several times. In fact, there is a standards interpretation (from 1995!) declaring that "delimiter" must be used as "field terminator" (and the standard consistently uses "delimiter"). The Posix rules are at http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_05 Bash follows them faithfully. The language isn't perfect, but there is practical consensus among shell implementations. Chet -- ``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer Live Strong. No day but today. Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/ _______________________________________________ Bug-bash mailing list Bug-bash@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-bash
