Why do commented lines in a linux configuration file sometimes work? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

Any line that begins with a # is a comment in many languages and is ignored by the interpreter (perl etc.).

However, if the first line of a script in Linux begins with a #! (shebang as it is called), it is not a comment but a directive to the program loader to actually run the program specified after #! and pass it the name of your file as the last argument.

For example, if the first line is

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

it means the shell will actually invoke /usr/bin/perl -w /path/to/the/script and you don't need to specify a program to run this script, you can run it using

/path/to/the/script

if you have the permission to run it and it is located on a filesystem supported for execution and the file has the permission to be executed.

For the interpreter, however, this line is always just a comment, so if the script is executed as:

perl /path/to/the/script

then the line has no effect. (Thanks to Ruslan for pointing this out).

Be warned that # is not always indicative of a comment. For example, a statement beginning with a # in C is pre-processor directive and not a comment.

In your case, the line is a comment and will be ignored while execution.

Update:

The file you are talking about is a menu.lst for which a comment is a line beginning with ## and not #. ^(Source)

Solution 2:

The line beginning with #! is still a comment, in that it is not executed as normal commands.

But not only is it a valid comment but it's also a hashbang, a line that can be used to indicate the interpreter to be used to execute these commands if the script is called on its own.

Hashbangs begin with a # in order to be backward-compatible with interpreters that don't read hashbangs, in which case they will simply be interpreted as comments and ignored.