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