Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wa3wbu!gdx!jay
From: jay@gdx.UUCP (Jay A. Snyder)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix.sco
Subject: Re: emptying a file and keeping its ownership
Message-ID: <97@gdx.UUCP>
Date: 5 Jan 91 04:26:58 GMT
References: <1990Dec30.220722.29050@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> <1990Dec31.214030.7816@athena.mit.edu> <1991Jan1.040621.27634@NCoast.ORG> <199
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Organization: GDX-BBS, Mechanicsburg, PA
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In-reply-to: jpr@jpradley.jpr.com's message of 1 Jan 91 17:30:14 GMT

>
>I find that in my csh, the following works:
>	% : > file
>That initial colon does the trick. What mechanism is operating here?
>

The ':' is a comment character for old versions of sh (dating from
V7), in fact V7 bourne shell doesn't accept '#' for comments.  Most
modern verions of sh do recongnize the ':'.

If you are running Xenix, the ':' is also used to tell a non bourne
shell that a script is intended for bourne shell (equiv to a BSD file
with #!/bin/sh as the first line).

J