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The concept of field separator has some private cases in different operating system shells and their utilities (IFS on Bourne shell and derivates, RS on AWK and perhaps more) but I am having troubl...
#2: Post edited
- The concept of *field separator* has some private cases in different operating system shells and their utilities (**IFS** on Bourne shell and derivates, **RS** on AWK and perhaps more) but I am having trouble understanding what is the purpose of the concept in general or which problem it was first aimed to solve.
I have personally understood that a "field separator" is any tabulation character and line break character such as the following but I am not sure that's correct:- * **Indentation characters:**
- * Whitespace character
- * Tabulation character
- * Other, less standard, indentation characters
- * **Line break characters:**
- * (non-carriage-return) Line Feed (**LF**)
- * Carriage Return Line Feed (**CRLF**)
- * Other, less standard, line break characters
- The concept of *field separator* has some private cases in different operating system shells and their utilities (**IFS** on Bourne shell and derivates, **RS** on AWK and perhaps more) but I am having trouble understanding what is the purpose of the concept in general or which problem it was first aimed to solve.
- I have personally understood that a "field separator" is any indentation character and line break character such as the following but I am not sure that's correct:
- * **Indentation characters:**
- * Whitespace character
- * Tabulation character
- * Other, less standard, indentation characters
- * **Line break characters:**
- * (non-carriage-return) Line Feed (**LF**)
- * Carriage Return Line Feed (**CRLF**)
- * Other, less standard, line break characters
#1: Initial revision
What are field separators in operating-programming languages (such as Bash)?
The concept of *field separator* has some private cases in different operating system shells and their utilities (**IFS** on Bourne shell and derivates, **RS** on AWK and perhaps more) but I am having trouble understanding what is the purpose of the concept in general or which problem it was first aimed to solve. I have personally understood that a "field separator" is any tabulation character and line break character such as the following but I am not sure that's correct: * **Indentation characters:** * Whitespace character * Tabulation character * Other, less standard, indentation characters * **Line break characters:** * (non-carriage-return) Line Feed (**LF**) * Carriage Return Line Feed (**CRLF**) * Other, less standard, line break characters