<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> <div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/12/17 1:15 PM, Greg Silverman (CS) wrote: </div> <blockquote cite="mid:675329def2504742aec893b0bc5e5b96@vrtsxchclupin05.community.veritas.com" type="cite"> Many of the generated fixes uses this idiom<o:p></o:p> IFS=$’\n’ …<o:p></o:p> unset $IFS<o:p></o:p><o:p> </o:p> IFS is a variable, but, $IFS is a character string, so, unsetting it does not restore IFS to its default value. What am I missing? </blockquote> Those lines are from the audit remediation templates, e.g.: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/blob/master/shared/xccdf/remediation_functions.xml#L97#L99">https://github.com/OpenSCAP/scap-security-guide/blob/master/shared/xccdf/remediation_functions.xml#L97#L99</a> <blockquote type="cite"> <meta charset="utf-8"> </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite">IFS=$'\n' matches=($(sed -s -n -e "/${pattern}/!d" -e "/${arch}/!d" -e "/${group}/!d;F" /etc/audit/rules.d/*.rules)) # Reset IFS back to default unset $IFS</blockquote> Because the variable is used multiple times (e.g. each audit remediation), it is a good practice to completely remove the variable/data from the system between function calls. For example: $ stringVar="This is my string" $ echo $stringVar This is my string $ unset stringVar $ echo $stringVar -bash: stringVar: unbound variable </body> </html>