[TUHS] Bourne shell and comments

Warren Toomey wkt at tuhs.org
Wed Apr 19 06:48:34 AEST 2017


I was trying to configure C news on 2.9BSD today and I found that its
Bourne shell doesn't grok # comments. The Bourne shell in 2.11BSD does.

So I thought: when did the Bourne (and other) shells first grok # as
indicating a comment? Was this in response to #! being added to the
kernel, or was it the other way around? And was the choice of #!
arbitrary, or was it borrowed from somewhere else?

Datum point: 2.9BSD's kernel can recognise #!, but the sh can't recognise #.

Cheers, Warren



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