From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Stephane Chazelas <stephane.chazelas@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [EXPAND] Split unquoted $@/$* correctly when IFS is set but empty
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 22:59:40 +0100
Message-ID: <20141020215940.GB20449@chaz.gmail.com>
References: <20141008072636.GA7524@gondor.apana.org.au>
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2014-10-08 15:26:36 +0800, Herbert Xu:
> commit 3c06acdac0b1ba0e0acdda513a57ee6e31385dce
> Author: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
> Date:   Wed Oct 8 15:24:23 2014 +0800
> 
>     [EXPAND] Split unquoted $@/$* correctly when IFS is set but empty
>     
>     Currently we do not field-split $@/$* when it isn't quoted and IFS
>     is set but empty.  This is obviously wrong.  This patch fixes this.
[...]

Well, if IFS is empty, field splitting is disabled. There's
nothing in POSIX that clearly says that $@ and $* should expand
to the positional parameters *as separate arguments in list
contexts*. yash and the Bourne shell behave like dash. Only
shells with array support behave differently.

The whole $*/$@ expansion is rather unclear in the POSIX spec.
I've just raised the problem on the Austin group mailing list.

See also

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.debian.devel.general/197901

Cheers,
Stephane