Shell script hygiene

Commenting is not just something you can do; it's an art by itself. In this part of the chapter, we are going to deal with comments in order to make your life easier when writing scripts, but the advice and best practices that are given here are easily used in any programming language that we can think of. Really understanding how to comment in a useful way is something that you're going to need to learn, since it will help anybody going to use your scripts after you are done writing them.

So, what are comments? Possibly the easiest way to describe them is to say that they are documentation on what the script is intended to do, how the script works, and who has created the script, and they provide more information on technical details of the script, such as when it was created.

Commenting is something that you should automatically want to do. Nobody is perfect and nobody has a perfect memory. Comments are there to help you remember what you did...