3 ms·

i usually do this when I want to create docstring-like behavior cat <<-DOC line 1 line 2 line 3 DOC

• teddyh 5y ago
  I once created a set of shell functions which I wanted to have a docstring-like functionality. The solution I came up with was to have each shell function start with the : command with a string as an argument. Since : is an actual command, not a comment, it was preserved as part of the function, and could be extracted at runtime using relatively simple parsing to do introspection. Example: foo(){ : "This is a docstring for the foo() function" bar --verbose | baz --quiet } For those who don’t know: ":" is a shell built-in command which does nothing and ignores all arguments. It was the way in which shell scripts had comments before the modern syntax of using # for comments was introduced.
  • nunez 5y ago
    That's insane. MSDOS Batch used the same syntax for comments!
    • teddyh 5y ago
      No, I’m pretty sure MS-DOS used "rem" (for “remark”) to do comments. Colons, “:”, in batch files were, IIRC, for labels, i.e. targets for “goto” statements.