Internal field separator

In Unix operating systems, internal field separator (abbreviated IFS) refers to the character or characters designated as whitespace by the operating system. IFS is actually a system variable, and it can be modified, which is useful programmatically in a number of ways.

IFS typically includes the space and the newline.

Some examples on how to apply the use of IFS in Bash scripts:

http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/internalvariables.html

http://mindspill.net/computing/linux-notes/using-the-bash-ifs-variable-to-make-for-loops-split-with-non-whitespace-characters/

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/bash-for-loop-spaces/