Comment lines in the Bourne shell
foss
foss at ihuxe.UUCP
Mon Jun 17 22:54:39 AEST 1985
> I've noticed that on my system (2.8BSD) the Bourne shell
> comment character doesn't do what I expected. The shell
> still looks at some characters on the line, even though
> the line is commented out. For example, the comment
>
> : 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?
>
.................................
The colon (:) is not just a 'comment' character, it is a command
which has no effect. The message about the pipe is to be expected.
Try using the octothorpe (#) as a comment character.
R. M. Foss
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