The colon

[Jan Schampera]

Hi.

In comp.unix.shell [1] somebody wondered about
  IFS=: read a b <<< a:b; echo "'$a' '$b'"
ending up in
  'a b' ''

Korn and Z seem to behave different. I see that across all my available
Bash versions. I remember the colon to be special in some way (was it
hostnames in a file path?), but I don't know.

If this is intended behaviour, can you tell me why (it's gone with
quoting/escaping, of course)?

J.

[1] <df5a1262-09ff-4c97-94e8-83a5a046f706@p36g2000prp.googlegroups.com>