Re: IFS

Nate Sammons - CVL System Admin (nate@VIS.ColoState.EDU)
Wed, 15 Feb 1995 08:46:56 -0700 (MST)

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