On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 4:22 AM, yy <yiyu....@gmail.com> wrote: > 2010/8/19 Suraj Kurapati <sun...@gmail.com>: >> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Suraj Kurapati <sun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> #!/bin/sh >> # your program description & usage documentation here >> # nicely formatted and beautified to fit 80 columns >> # NOTE: the blank line below is the end of the file comment header >> >> sed -n '2,/^$/s/^# \?//p' "$0" # show this file's comment header > > I find this solution really convoluted. Why not using echo? You can > use an USAGE variable, or even a here-document and cat<< if you feel > like it.
I like to put documentation at the head of a file because that's only part anyone will read before deciding if it's worth spending their time to delve into the rest of the shell script. Also, I don't like messing up my program's indentation because I have to emit a big block of text in it: if ...; then # ugly! cat <<EOF your documentation here EOF fi > And btw, it would probably be a good idea to redirect the > help message to stderr. Good idea.
