I love using FS and RS in my shell scripts, esp. when I'm processing text data export from a database. As long as the data doesn't include binary data (such as

I love using FS and RS in my shell scripts, esp. when I'm processing text data export from a database. As long as the data doesn't include binary data (such as images), I can be pretty certain that the data doesn't include FS and RS characters since they don't appear on a keyboard -- therefore I can preserve things like line breaks in text fields, and don't have worry about if someone inserted a " | " character in the contents of the data. Of course a pre-pass is to strip out FS / RS just to make sure in case it got in accidentally, and to also know the purpose of the data to ensure that they shouldn't be in the text. But so far that has made my scripts a lot more reliable. The other alternative is to do the light-weight processing using a heaver scripting language that can deal with structured data natively, but setting FS and RS is often times a bit more expedient for me.