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From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Comment lines in the Bourne shell
Message-ID: <2288@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 10-Jun-85 17:01:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.2288
Posted: Mon Jun 10 17:01:10 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 14-Jun-85 05:04:14 EDT
References: <1194@uwmacc.UUCP>
Distribution: net
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 17

> 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 isn't really a comment; it's a command that doesn't do anything
(however, it returns "true", so "while :" is equivalent to "while true" -
and faster, since ":" is built-in).  The 4.xBSD Bourne shell and the System
<n> Bourne shell also support real comments; a "#" on a command line causes
the rest of the line to be ignored by the shell.

	Guy Harris