Bash

Expansion

From the Bash manual:

“Expansion is performed on the command line after it has been split into words. There are seven kinds of expansion performed: brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter and variable expansion, command substitution, arithmetic expansion, word splitting, and pathname expansion.

The order of expansions is: brace expansion, tilde expansion, parameter, variable and arithmetic expansion and command substitution (done in a left-to-right fashion), word splitting, and pathname expansion.”

Word Splitting

Internal Field Separator (IFS)

The IFS is a special shell variable used for word splitting and the shell uses it to determine word boundaries. The default value is space, tab, and newline.

IFS=':' # Set IFS to colon