Re: unexpected behavior of 'read' builtin

[Chet Ramey]

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    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/