I understand setting and using the IFS environmental variable, but I just
want to set it to trigger on an EOL (carriage return) and I can't quite
figure out how to do this?

I've dug the man page and it's useless and none of the tutorials I've found
address special characters.

In this example, I want to print each line of rc.conf with a 'X' at the
start and end of each line printed.  Instead I get a 'X' at the start and a
'X' at the end of the text....

#!/bin/sh

IFS=`echo`  # set a EOL to IFS or so I thought
export IFS

lines=`cat /etc/rc.conf`

for line in $lines ; do
 echo "X"$line"X"
done

#EOF


Any ideas?

jam