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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell
Subject: IFS=$'\n'
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2024 08:26:41 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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I like having spaces in file/directory names, but I avoid putting newlines 
in them.

This plays havoc with the shell’s word-splitting rules, because the 
default value for IFS is

    IFS=$' \t\n'

which means names with spaces in them get split into separate items, 
triggering lots of errors about items not found (or the wrong items found/
created).

However, if you change this to

    IFS=$'\n'

then this can make things much more convenient (provided you can be sure 
there are no newlines in your file names). For example, I can do

    ls -lt $(find . -type f -iname \*fred\*)

to search for all filenames containing “fred” in the hierarchy rooted at 
the current directory, and display them in reverse chronological order.