Why can't I set IFS in zsh?

Question

I'm on zsh. What is going on here...?

It seems I just can't set the IFS; it stays on '\n' (newline, not 'n') when I investigate, but neither in my .zshenv nor .zshrc did I set it.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!

EDIT

Another example of how weird my arrays are behaving:

Again, thanks in advance!

Try b=($=a) - zsh doesn't perform word splitting on variable expansions by default - see for example What is word splitting? Why is it important in shell programming? — steeldriver, Jan 11 '22 at 23:42
That worked! So weird, it always worked for me like above until today :/ — René Fokkema, Jan 12 '22 at 00:12
please do not post pictures of text ... post the text itself ... some people here cannot view images — jsotola, Jan 12 '22 at 02:41

score 5 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 12 '22 at 00:20

The issue is not that you can't set IFS, it's that (unlike in bash for example) in zsh, unquoted variable expansions are not subject to "split + glob" (word splitting and filename generation). So the whole of $a is being assigned to the first element of b (which is $b[1], since arrays are indexed from 1 in zsh - again different from bash).

To get bash-like behavior, you can either set zsh's shwordsplit shell option, or make the variable expansion word split explicitly using $=a in place of plain $a.

For a more nuanced explanation, see What is word splitting? Why is it important in shell programming?

Why can't I set IFS in zsh?

1 Answers1