[TUHS] Shell control through external commands

[Joerg Schilling]

markus schnalke <meillo at marmaro.de> wrote:

> I think I've seen many eary (pre-Shebang and even pre-#-comment)
> shell scripts start with a colon. Is this only a coincidence with
> having a comment at the beginning or was the colon character magic
> in some way?

The colon was introduced by AT&T around 1983. It was used for Bourne Shell 
scripts. Some of these scripts made it into SVr4 and caused problems with 
non-Bourne compatible other shells.

Jörg

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