Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Colon

| ### 22.2.3 : In the beginning, the magic number for Bourne shell scripts used to be a colon followed by a newline. Most Unices still support this, and will correctly pass a file with a single colon as its first line to ``/bin/sh'` for interpretation. Nobody uses this any more and I suspect some very new Unices may have forgotten about it entirely, so you should stick to the more usual ``#! /bin/sh'` syntax for your own scripts. You may occasionally come across a very old script that starts with a ``:'` though, and it is nice to know why! In addition, all known Bourne compatible shells have a builtin command, ``:'` which always returns success. It is equivalent to the system command `/bin/true`, but can be used from a script without the overhead of starting another process. When setting a shell variable as a flag, it is good practice to use the commands, `:` and `false` as values, and choose the sense of the variable to be ``:'` in the common case: When you come to test the value of the variable, you will avoid the overhead of additional processes most of the time.
    var=:
    if $var; then
      foo
    fi
The `:` command described above can take any number of arguments, which it will fastidiously ignore. This allows the ``:'` character to double up as a comment leader of sorts. Be aware that the characters that follow are not discarded, they are still interpreted by the shell, so metacharacters can have unexpected effects:
    $ cat foo
    :
    : echo foo
    : `echo bar`
    : `echo baz >&2'
    $ ./foo
    baz
You may find very old shell scripts that are commented using ``:'`, or new scripts that exploit this behavior in some esoteric fashion. My advice is, don't: It will bite you later.

This document was generated by Gary V. Vaughan on May, 24 2001 using texi2html