[u-u] Sams book

[Bill Duncan]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 05:39:47PM -0500, Hello Kittyhawk wrote:
> |replace all those shebangs with ":".
> 
> 	. o 0 ( what is this ":" you speak of? )

>From that Power Tools tome I spoke of (which is funnier than what
probably transpired):

  Once upon a time, there was the Bourne shell. Since there was only
  "the" shell, there was no trouble deciding how to run a script:
  run it with the shell. It worked, and everyone was happy.

  Along came progress and wrote another shell. The people thought this
  was good, for now they could choose their own shell. So some chose
  the one, and some the other, and they wrote shell scripts and were
  happy. But one day some- one who used the "other" shell ran a script
  by someone who used the "other other" shell, and alas! it bombed
  spectacularly. The people wailed and called upon their Guru for help.

  "Well," said the Guru, "I see the problem. The one shell and the other
  are not compatible. We need to make sure that the shells know which
  other shell to use to run each script. And lo! the one shell has a
  "comment" called :, and the other a true comment called #. I hereby
  decree that henceforth, the one shell will run scripts that start
  with :, and the other those that start with #." And it was so, and
  the people were happy.

I remember doing some Xenix (ugh, remember that) scripting and used
: at the start of scripts..

I pulled out (and blew the dust off) my 7th Edition ATT manuals however
and couldn't find a reference to it.  Must've happened somewhere between
then and SVR3 (which Xenix was based on).

-- 
Bill Duncan,
bduncan at beachnet.org
+1 416 697-9315