[TUHS] Shell control through external commands

[Norman Wilson]

Joerg Schilling:

  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.

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Interesting.  I never knew of that convention.  I remember seeing
shell scripts with a : at the front, but thought that was just to
make sure the first character wasn't # even if the script began with
a comment.

Since some here had never heard of the #-means-csh convention, I
should perhaps explain about :.  In pre-Bourne shells that used the
simple external control-flow mechanisms that I think were discussed
here a few months ago, : was used to mark a label: goto(1) would
seek to the beginning of its standard input, then read until it
encountered a line of the form
	: label
with the desired label, then exit with the seek pointer at the first
character of the following line.

: was a no-op command; I forget whether it was implemented within the
shell or externally.  Either way, that made it useful as a comment
character, but somewhat clumsy: it was just a command, with no
special parsing rules attached.  A comment using : had to begin at
a command boundary, and its arguments were parsed in the normal way:
	rm -rf * : you don't want to do this
was probably not what you wanted, instead you had to type
	rm -rf * ; : "you don't want to do this"
or the like.

csh used # as a comment character from the beginning.  Bourne
adopted it too.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON