f-e-k improvement discussion continued

[Al Dunsmuir]

On Monday, July 19, 2010, 12:45:30 PM, Adam wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-07-19 at 09:02 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:

>> > A shebang is one of those bits at the start of a script that looks like
>> > this:
>> >
>> > #!/bin/bash
>> >
>> > which tells the system what shell the script is supposed to be run with.
>> > The shebang is the #! part. The # is the 'she', the ! is the 'bang'.
>> 
>> I believe it's "shabang", with the "#" being the musical notation for
>> "sharp".  Some other names for it are "hash" and Americans sometime
>> call it a "pound sign" (yes, I'm an American).

> Wikipedia doesn't list shabang as a current usage -
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_%28Unix%29 - but refers to it
> historically, though I'd never seen that before. It wouldn't be called
> just 'hash', either - it'd be 'hashbang'. ('Hash' is a British English
> term for the character # alone, hence hashbang for #!).

The # is an invented character that originated at AT&T for touch tone
dialing.  The  official name is "octothorpe" - Greek for "8 points"...
but no one ever calls it that.

I think it got called "pound sign" because it was placed on keyboards
where typewriters used to place the British Pound Sterling symbol.

Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_sign

Daddy... what's a typewriter? Lord, do I feed old all of a sudden.
Al
> Google Fight? 708,000 for 'shebang', 127,000 for 'shabang'. :) Although
> it seems most of those results refer to the non-techy meaning(s) of the
> word(s).
> -- 
> Adam Williamson