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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

In a POSIX shell, I actually prefer to use the bell character for IFS.

  while IFS="$(printf \\a)" read -r field1 field2...
  do ...
  done

This works just as well as anything outside the range of printing characters.

Getting records that contain newlines would be a bit trickier.

Heaven help you if you cat the file in a shell, though!

I think IFS=$'\a' works too.

Only in bash and possibly other shells that extend the POSIX syntax, not in the basic POSIX standard.

I seem to remember something about dash adding that functionality.

...I found it - the question is under review by the Austin group for inclusion in POSIX.