z/OS V1R9.0 UNIX System Services Command ... - Christian Grothoff

Options
Examples
In general, a single IFS character marks the end of one field and the beginning of
the next. For example, if IFS is colon (:), read considers the input a::b to have
three fields: a, an empty field, and b. However, if IFS contains blanks, tabs or
escaped newlines, read considers a sequence of multiple blanks, tabs, or escaped
newlines to be a single field separator. For example, "a b" has two fields, even
though there are several blanks between the a and b.
The nth variable in the command line is assigned the nth field. If there are more
input fields than there are variables, the last variable is assigned all the unassigned
fields. If there are more variables than fields, the extra variables are assigned the
null string ("").
The environment variable REPLY is assigned the input when no variables are
given. The exit status of read is 0, unless it encounters the end of the file.
–p Receives input from a coprocess.
–r Treats input as raw data, ignoring escape conventions. For example, read
–r does not interpret a final backslash (\) as a line continuation character,
but as part of the input.
–s Adds input to the command history file as well as to the variables specified
with variable.
–u[d] Reads input from the single-digit file descriptor d, rather than from the
standard input. The default file descriptor is 0.
When the first variable parameter has the form:
variable?prompt
it defines a prompt for input. If the shell is interactive, read sends the prompt to the
file descriptor d if it is open for write and is a terminal device. The default file
descriptor for the prompt is 2.
IFS=’:’
while read name junk junk1 junk2 junk3
do
echo $name
done