Re: GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stallman

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH (allbery@kf8nh.apk.net)
Mon, 29 Mar 1999 08:27:19 -0500


In message <19990329102549.A7484@pcep-jamie.cern.ch>, Jamie Lokier writes:
+-----
| On all systems I've encountered, `:' is a perfectly good command for not
| doing anything. Is it too new to be portable?
+--->8

"New"? That's how we old-timers used to have to comment shell scripts before
"#" comments were added to /bin/sh.

The reason it's not used as a generic command substituter (usually in
Makefiles) is that it's a shell builtin. make execvp's commands, so : would
fail unless you had in the command some kind of marker that told make to pass
the command to sh instead (in older/non-GNU make, this mostly means
wildcards).

-- 
brandon s. allbery	[os/2][linux][solaris][japh]	 allbery@kf8nh.apk.net
system administrator	     [WAY too many hats]	   allbery@ece.cmu.edu
carnegie mellon / electrical and computer engineering			 KF8NH
     We are Linux. Resistance is an indication that you missed the point.

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