IFS

Internal Field Separator used for shell word splitting.

Ubuntu Debian Arch Fedora CentOS SUSE Alpine macOS FreeBSD

Verified: 2026-05-12

Syntax

$echo "$IFS"

Examples

$oldIFS=$IFS; IFS=','; set -- $line; IFS=$oldIFS

$while IFS= read -r line; do ...; done < file.txt

Typical use cases

Standard usage

IFS --help

Note Controls how the shell splits strings into fields.

Export