Juliano F. Ravasi wrote:
I got bitten by two unexpected (and undocumented) behaviors of
the 'read' builtin.
The first one is that it doesn't seem to handle word separators
equally, making distinction when spaces and non-space
separators are used to separate words.
Posix makes the distinction explicit. Read the `Field Splitting'
section (2.6.5) in
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/xcu_chap02.html#tag_02_06_05
The second one is that it chops leading and trailing whitespace
when you provide one variable for assignment, and not when you
use the default $REPLY.
This is the behavior to which the language in the man page that talks
about `the line read' being assigned to REPLY refers. Bash behaves as
it does when using REPLY to make it easy to read an entire line verbatim
without having to temporarily alter $IFS.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
