Hello, i'm new to all this but was encouraged to bring up an issue to the dash mailing list. It seems like setting the IFS for read to a tab does not work as it should. For example: consider a testfile with the following content: test1(space)test2(tab)test3 (where the "(space)" is an actual space etc) then: #!/bin/dash cat testfile | while IFS=' ' read col1 col2; do #an actual tab echo $col1 echo $col2 done exit 0 it gives the output: test1 test2 test3 because it seems to interpret the space as part of IFS? i might be wrong though, but some other people reproduced the error on various systems for the later versions of dash, so that's why im writing to you. regards peter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe dash" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html