Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!bellcore!faline!thumper!ulysses!andante!alice!debra
From: debra@alice.UUCP (Paul De Bra)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Bourne Shell Comments Problem
Keywords: Bourne Shell UNIX Problem
Message-ID: <8225@alice.UUCP>
Date: 21 Sep 88 17:33:50 GMT
References: <292@dsacng1.UUCP>
Reply-To: debra@alice.UUCP ()
Organization: University of Antwerp
Lines: 18

In article <292@dsacng1.UUCP> nab1382@dsacng1.UUCP (Dick Hauser) writes:
>I have a question regarding usage of a comment line in the Bourne
>Shell.  Here is the situation.  The comment indicator (i.e #) is
>in position 1 of the first record of the file.  The comment line
>was followed by a read command for a varibale.  When the shell  
>was executed using "sh -x shellname", everything worked.  But
>when the shell is executed, and execution is not traced, an error
>message "read not found" is displayed.

On some Unix systems instead of looking for the magic number #!
the kernel only looks for # to find out whether a file is a shell
script, possibly for another shell.
So the # sign on position 1 of the first line of a file is not REALLY
a comment indicator on these odd unix systems.

Easy fix: start with an empty line first and start the comment on line 2.

Paul.