Why parse lines with colons
Nick Landsberg
npl at spuxll.UUCP
Tue Jul 17 14:08:25 AEST 1984
One of the reasons /bin/sh (bsh to those who like csh)
parses lines with ":" in the beginning is because of
constructs like the following:
: ${FOO:-default}
This effectively sets $FOO to a default value if not previously
set. The longhand way would be:
if [ "${FOO}" = "" ]
then
FOO=default
fi
From the hairy eyeball of ---
Nick Landsberg ( ....!spuxll!npl)
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