Comment lines in the Bourne shell

[Steven List]

In article <1194 at uwmacc.UUCP> jwp at uwmacc.UUCP writes:
>
>: to use this file type <name> | lpr
>
>produces a message referring to the pipe, even though the whole
>line is commented out.  What am I missing?

You're operating under a misunderstanding.  The colon is not a comment
character!  The comment character is the pound/sharp/octalthorpe (#).
The colon is a builtin COMMAND.  The definition from my manual is:

	No effect; the command does nothing.  A zero exit code
	is returned.

It is, however, evaluated!  I ran into the same thing, thus the ready
answer :->~
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