It's basically the storing of a verbatim one-line command as a line comment in a .go source file rather than its traditional home of a line in a shell script or

It's basically the storing of a verbatim one-line command as a line comment in a .go source file rather than its traditional home of a line in a shell script or makefile. Imagine you found it intolerable to have an interpreter-dependant -- not even /bin/sh -- source file in your package directory (said another way, anything but .go source files in the package directory), but at the same time needed to somehow sneak in the functionality of a rudimentary shell script. The answer? Weave it into a .go source file and the Go toolchain will be able to pick up on and execute it (on demand, never automatically).