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From: steven@luke.UUCP (Steven List)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Comment lines in the Bourne shell
Message-ID: <215@luke.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 13-Jun-85 15:23:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: luke.215
Posted: Thu Jun 13 15:23:52 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 17-Jun-85 08:23:18 EDT
References: <1194@uwmacc.UUCP>
Reply-To: steven@luke.UUCP (Steven List)
Distribution: net
Organization: Uncle Bene's Farm
Lines: 21

In article <1194@uwmacc.UUCP> jwp@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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