I was reading about environment variables and I also found this article Internal Variables that describes the variables used by bash. In reading that I learned about the awk FS variable which aids in field splitting. See page 146 of sed & awk by Dougherty and Robbins for details, but basically you can set FS to a single character to have lines split into fields based on that character, or you can specify a regular expression such as “\t+” (any number of tabs separates fields) or “[,;]” (a single comma or fullstop will separate fields).