markus schnalke <meillo at marmaro.de> wrote:

> I think I've seen many eary (pre-Shebang and even pre-#-comment)
> shell scripts start with a colon. Is this only a coincidence with
> having a comment at the beginning or was the colon character magic
> in some way?

The colon was introduced by AT&T around 1983. It was used for Bourne Shell 
scripts. Some of these scripts made it into SVr4 and caused problems with 
non-Bourne compatible other shells.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/'