FW: Please educate me

[Medland, Bill]

Thanks for the responses guys, but..
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Laight [mailto:david(a)l8s.co.uk]
> Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 3:33 AM
> Cc: Wine devel (E-mail)
> Subject: Re: Please educate me
>
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2002 at 04:13:03AM +0200, Sylvain Petreolle wrote:
> > > noticed that
> > >
> > > for ac_dir in /sbin:/usr/sbin:$PATH
> > >
> > > was splitting as 
> > > 1. /sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin
> > > 2. /bin
> > > 3. /usr/bin
> > > etc.
> >
> > it's a normal behaviour, because for uses space as a
> > separator, not ':' ??
> > > Now, I know I can force it to work by changing the
> > > for loop to 
> > > for ac_dir in /sbin /usr/sbin $PATH
>
> If you have:
>   more_path="/sbin:/usr/sbin:$PATH"
> you can do:
>   save_ifs="$IFS"
>   IFS=" :"
>   for ac_dir in $more_path
>   do
>       IFS="$save_ifs"
>       ...
>   done
>
> So that the shell treats ':' as a separator when
> parsing the output of the substitution.
>
> David
>
> -- 
> David Laight: david(a)l8s.co.uk

So why does "for" use spaces as the separator between the /sbin, the
/usr/sbin and the $PATH but $IFS while expanding the $PATH (which is using
:)?  (And how come configure used to work OK but doesn't now?)

(And, of course, it is configure.ac I will have to change so I don't get to
change how AC_PATH_PROG gets expanded, and using spaces to separate will go
against the documentation on autoconf)

Bill