5 Jan
2020
5 Jan
'20
5:01 a.m.
On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 11:45 PM markus schnalke <meillo(a)marmaro.de> wrote:
While developing, I frequently have some code like:
if test -f somefile
then
cmd1
cmd2
else
echo somefile is missing
fi
I have the "else" clause because I initially want to explicitly see some
output in that case. A bit later if I temporarily don't want the output
(but want to keep the else and the echo line around) I can just put a colon
before the echo. You can't do that with a # because you get a syntax error.
And if you wanted to use # you'd then have to put in some other do-nothing
line (maybe a : by itself) to keep valid syntax. In a situation like this
I will eventually end up deleting the echo line and the preceding else, but
during development I like being able to use : in this way.
Terry
but : is much nicer because you can
"comment" out a
single command in (e.g.) an if/then and it remains syntactically valid
and
executable. I find it very elegant.
Can you please give an example for me to understand what you mean
by that?
meillo