Attempting to understand behavior of /bin/ksh's read command

[Virden, Larry W.]

The man page for ksh on redhat says 

       read [-prsun] [parameter ...]

              Reads  a  line  of  input from standard input, separate
the line

              into fields using the IFS parameter  (see  Substitution
above),

              and assign each field to the specified parameters.  

 

 


However, when I type:

$ uname -a

Linux linux01 2.4.21-32.0.1.ELsmp #1 SMP Tue May 17 17:52:23 EDT 2005
i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

 

$ /bin/ksh

$ echo aa bb cc dd | read a b c d

$ echo $a

/bin/ksh: a: parameter not set

 

it appears that there is either a bug in ksh or the documentation is
wrong.

 

Is there either a newer version of ksh or doc?

 

How can I tell the version number of the /bin/ksh that comes as a part
of redhat linux?