My thoughts exactly. The design of the unix shell is broken, and not anything else. In particular, the lack of a well supported list/array. If there was a list type, you could store filenames in a list, and there would be no reason for the IFS stuff. And by well-supported, I mean you could easily encode a list unambiguously to stdout, and decode it on the other end.

I know about bash arrays, but those are neither well-supported nor standard. For example you can't easily return an array from a bash function, which is a major problem.