Acbosg.287
fa.unix-wizards
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:ARPAVAX:mhtsa!harpo!cbosg!mark
Wed Dec 16 10:39:14 1981
Re: '#' botch in 4.1BSD Bourne Shell
Sorry, Steve, but you're way off base.

Bell has also gone to the convention that # begins a comment in the
Bourne shell.  # is the standard UNIX comment character and most
programs that allow comments do it the same way: anything after a #
is ignored.  The old comment mechanism in sh (:) didn't work worth
a damn and everybody knows it.  Berkeley was merely moving in step
with Bell.

You can fix your old Bourne shell scripts by putting
       #! /bin/sh
at the front of them, and csh scripts by putting
       #! /bin/csh
in front of them.  You'll also have to stop using # as a backup
character - Rand uses , and this seems like as good a convention
as any.

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