Korn Shell Programming by Example

#—Comments Explained

As you would expect, someone who has been a part of the writing of nine different books would be pushing documentation. And it is true, I am. More importantly, documenting what I have done while it is fresh in my mind has saved me countless hours of work. I usually take a few minutes and provide some simple headers and some quick explanations of what I am doing in a script. Comments are the way to add these simple headers and quick explanations within your script. In shell scripting, a comment runs from where the pound sign (#) begins to the end of the line. Therefore, something like this is feasible:

$ ls -l # give a listing of all files in the current directory!

But the shell will interpret this as follows:

 $ ls -l  ...