Shell – Multiline command : comment out one line

scriptingshellshell-script

I like to use the following format in scripts for commands with a lot of parameters (for readability):

docker run \
 --rm \
 -u root \
 -p 8080:8080 \
 -v jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home \
 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
 -v "$HOME":/home \
 jenkinsci/blueocean

But, sometimes I'd like to comment one of these parameters out like:

# -p 8080:8080

This doesn't work, as the EOL is interpreted as return and the command fails. Tried this too:

\ # -p 8080:8080

which also didn't work.

Question: Is there a way to comment out the parameter, so it's still on its own line, but I'd be able to execute the script?

Best Answer

You could substitute an empty command substitution:

docker run \
 --rm \
 -u root \
 $(: -p 8080:8080 ) \
 -v jenkins-data:/var/jenkins_home \
 -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
 -v "$HOME":/home \
 jenkinsci/blueocean

Related Solutions

Bash Shell – Multi-Line Command with Comments

Comments end at the first newline (see shell token recognition rule 10), without allowing continuation lines, so this code has foo in a separate command line:

echo # this is a comment \
foo

As for your first proposal, the backslash isn't followed by a newline, you're just quoting the space: it's equivalent to

echo ' # this is a comment'
foo

$(: this is a comment) substitutes the output of the command : this is a comment. If the output of that command is empty, this is effectively a highly confusing way to insert a comment in the middle of a line.

There's no magic going on: : is an ordinary command, the colon utility, which does nothing. The colon utility is mostly useful when the shell syntax requires a command but you happen to have nothing to do.

# Sample code to compress files that don't look compressed
case "$1" in
  *.gz|*.tgz|*.bz2|*.zip|*.jar|*.od?) :;; # the file is already compressed
  *) bzip2 -9 "$1";;
esac

Another use case is an idiom for setting a variable if it's not already set.

: "${foo:=default value}"

The remark about goto is a historical one. The colon utility dates back from even before the Bourne shell, all the way to the Thompson shell, which had a goto instruction. The colon then meant a label; a colon is a fairly common syntax for goto labels (it's still present in sed).

Shell Script – Cut Tab-Delimited Text File Lines to 80 Characters

I think you're looking for expand and/or unexpand. It seems you're trying to ensure a \tab width counts as 8 chars rather than the single one. fold will do that as well, but it will wrap its input to the next line rather than truncating it. I think you want:

expand < input | cut -c -80

expand and unexpand are both POSIX specified:

The expand utility shall write files or the standard input to the standard output with \tab characters replaced with one or more space characters needed to pad to the next tab stop. Any backspace characters shall be copied to the output and cause the column position count for tab stop calculations to be decremented; the column position count shall not be decremented below zero.

Pretty simple. So, here's a look at what this does:

unset c i; set --;                                                             
until [ "$((i+=1))" -gt 10 ]; do set -- "$@" "$i" "$i"; done                      
for c in 'tr \\t \ ' expand;  do eval '                                           
    { printf "%*s\t" "$@"; echo; } | 
      tee /dev/fd/2 |'"$c"'| { 
      tee /dev/fd/3 | wc -c >&2; } 3>&1 |
      tee /dev/fd/2 | cut -c -80'
done

The until loop at top gets a set of data like...

1 1 2 2 3 3 ...

It printfs this with the %*s arg padding flag so for each of those in the set printf will pad with as many spaces as are in the number of the argument. To each one it appends a \tab character.

All of the tees are used to show the effects of each filter as it is applied.

And the effects are these:

1        2        3        4        5        6        7        8                9               10
1  2   3    4     5      6       7        8         9         10 
1  2   3    4     5      6       7        8         9         10 
66
1        2        3        4        5        6        7        8                9               10
1        2        3        4        5        6        7        8                9               10 
1        2        3        4        5        6        7        8                
105

Those rows are lined up in two sets like...

output of printf ...; echo
output of tr ... or expand
output of cut
output of wc

The top four rows are the results of the tr filter - in which each \tab is converted to a single space.

And the bottom four the results of the expand chain.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Bash Shell – Multi-Line Command with Comments

Shell Script – Cut Tab-Delimited Text File Lines to 80 Characters

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