Bill Shirley <webnut@conc.tds.net> writes:
> Forgive me it this is the wrong place to post this observation, but
> it's the only place I know of. I'm also new to writing scripts, so
It's still off-topic here; I think the newsgroup comp.os.linux.misc is
a much more appropriate forum.
> Why would the IFS value effect the output of the second echo
> ${TIMESTAMP} statement (missing colons)?
You didn't quote $TIMESTAMP, so bash performed word splitting on it
and gave echo the arguments 09/22/97, 16, 47, and 08. When echo has
multiple arguments, it separates them with spaces because it has no
way to know how they were separated on the command line.
In the future, could you please (1) read appropriate documentation
(the bash and echo manpages in this case) before asking questions and
(2) ask them in appropriate fora?
-- Aaron M. Ucko <amu@mit.edu> (finger amu@monk.mit.edu) [Stark raving sane]