I'm setting it to a carriage return:
IFS="
"
As I've done a million times before. The result is the ability to read
a text file one line at a time rather than one word at a time. That
functionality still works fine, it's just that tcpdump is *.
> > Ok, perhaps one of the experts here can help. I'm just trying to write
> > a small script that will start a tcpdump. The dump will be started
> > with a variable for tcpdump's parameters. This works fine:
> > cmd="-i eth0"
> > tcpdump $cmd
> > BUT, if I then add an IFS command before it (to eventually allow me to
> > read the parameters from a config file) it doesn't work. This fails:
> > IFS="
> > "
> > cmd="-i eth0"
> > tcpdump $cmd
> > with a "tcpdump: ioctl: No such device"
> > I've tried it with Redhat EL3 and FC5 with the same results. Can
> > someone explain what the heck's going on?
> bash can't parse the command string properly because you changed the
> field separator. What are you setting IFS to?
> $IFS
> internal field separator
> This variable determines how Bash recognizes fields, or word
> boundaries when it interprets character strings.
> $IFS defaults to whitespace (space, tab, and newline), but may be
> changed, for example, to parse a comma-separated data file. Note that
> $* uses the first character held in $IFS. See Example 5-1.
> --
by