General comment ... I'm hesitant to fiddle with IFS; if the function exits early it can make the rest of the script nonsensical. Same goes for other 'globals'

General comment ... I'm hesitant to fiddle with IFS; if the function exits early it can make the rest of the script nonsensical. Same goes for other 'globals' or externals such as globbing and using tput. You have to be careful to trap errors and return things to sanity.