IFS system variable

[Eric Khanukayev]

Hello guys.
Using RH 7.1
Please help me to change value of IFS variable(I need this temporarily, 
just to run one program, then I will reset it back to original)
I tried:
export IFS=:

grep eric /etc/passwd |awk '{print $5}'

still not working. I'm just trying to print 5th field from /etc/passwd 
that will show users full name.
It counts blank space as an Internal Field Separator(IFS) but not ":"
Sun,BSD,AIX and SCO work fine. But RedHat has it's own "opinion" on this.
I tried bash and sh.
Maybe You know different way of doing this, if so please let me know.
Thanks again for Your time.

Erick@prodigy.net