On Sat, Jan 4, 2020 at 11:45 PM markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de> wrote:

>
> > 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?
>

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


>
> meillo
>