Comments in command-line Zsh

user_277128 0
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I switched from Bash to Zsh on Ubuntu and I'm quite happy about it. However, there is something I really miss and I did not find how to achieve the same thing.

In Bash, whenever I was typing a long command and noticed I had to run something else before, I just had to comment it out like in the following:

me@home> #mysuperlongcommand with some arguments
me@home> thecommandIhavetorunfirst #and then: up up
me@home> #mysuperlongcommand with some arguments #I just need to uncomment it!

However, this quite recurrent situation is not as easy to address as with zsh, given #mysuperlongcommand will be run as such (and resulting in: zsh: command not found: #mysuperlongcommand.

zsh command-line
6 Answers
: sh generate_sample.sh arg1

The addition of ":" doesn't execute the command in zsh.

sh generate_sample.sh : arg1

Now the arg1 is commented.

I am on Mac OS Big Sur and used it multiple times.

Edit: ":" procedure works with giving no spaces. ": command" is correct but ":command" isn't

user_60559780

Add the line setopt INTERACTIVE_COMMENTS to your ~/.zshrc file, save it, and relaunch the shell.

This is to clarify on @Lajnold's answer and @Hamish Downer's comment. It just took me a little bit to figure out how to make this change permanent. You probably want to add that line before exporting variables, so maybe add it toward the top of the file. I already had setopt PROMPT_SUBST in my ~/.zshrc file, so I just added it after that line. This will ensure the settings are loaded every time you launch the zsh terminal.

user_97163980

In addition to setopt interactivecomments, suggested by @Lajnold, you might also want to add something like the following to prevent certain comments from being written to history (from https://superuser.com/questions/352788/how-to-prevent-a-command-in-the-zshell-from-being-saved-into-history):

This overrides the ZSH built-in function zshaddhistory():

  • Will log comments that start in column 1 not followed by one or more spaces (i.e. #somecommand that I want to come back to)
  • Won't log comments that start in column 1 followed by one or more spaces
  • Won't log indented comments, padded by spaces from column 1
  • Won't log commands with a space in column 1 (handy shortcut for running commands that you don't want logged
setopt interactivecomments

function zshaddhistory() {
  emulate -L zsh
  if ! [[ "$1" =~ "(^#\s+|^\s+#|^ )" ]] ; then
      print -sr -- "${1%%$'\n'}"
      fc -p
  else
      return 1
  fi
}

For reference, this is the default zshaddhistory() http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Functions.html

zshaddhistory() {
  print -sr -- ${1%%$'\n'}
  fc -p .zsh_local_history
}
user_13617820
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