[NTLUG:Discuss] Strings in BASH, an easier way?

[Leroy Tennison]

I'm wanting to split a string in BASH.  I know about gawk and maybe sed 
but I'm looking for a less involved solution.  The simplest I've found 
so far is the cut program but I'm wondering if there is something even 
simpler.

To add some context, what surfaced this is I wanted to do an apropos on 
all programs in my path.  What I have at this point is:

for i in `echo $PATH | cut -d: -f1-30 --output-delimiter=" "`; do
for j in `ls -1 $i`; do apropos $j; read; done;
done

Not only is this a little more verbose than I want but the -f parameter 
is a little "brittle" in that there doesn't appear to be any to say 
"however many fields there are".