Adding comments inside single quotes in a shell script?

Question

Can I put comments ( commented out code or notes that don't affect the script ) inside of single quotes within a shell script?

I have tried the following to get these to work:

# comment
\# comment
\/\* comment \*\/

Below is an example of what I'm trying to do. You'll see my comments start with a hash and are inside single quotes withint the curl request's data package.

curl -XPOST 'http://ec2-54-234-64-66.compute-1.amazonaws.com:9200/nsns/nsn/_mapping?pretty=true' -d '{
    "nsn" : {

        "type" : "object",
        "include_in_all" : "false",
        "index" : "no",
        "properties" : {

        # this data is used for facetting END

            "id" : { "type" : "long", "include_in_all" : "true" },
            "BDC_CODE" : { "type" : "byte" },
            "KID" : { "type" : "byte" },
            "ITEM_STANDARDIZATION_CODE" : { "type" : "string" },

        # we don't know what these field's data look like yet

            "stock_on_hand" : { "type" : "integer" },
            "non_stocked_items" : { "type" : "integer" },
            "stocked_restrictions" : { "type" : "string" },
            "consistency_of_spend" : { "type" : "string" },
            "WSDC" : { "type" : "string" }

        }
    }
}'

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

2

The problem is not single quotes but using JSON. AFAIK, you can't add comments in JSON, see Can comments be used in JSON?

Note :

you should add -H "Content-Type: text/json" in your cURL

edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

Community

1
1

answered Jan 09 '13 at 23:19

Gilles Quénot

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 10 '13 at 01:25

You can't put them inside the quotes, but you can break the string up so the comments can stay:

json='{
    "nsn" : {

        "type" : "object",
        "include_in_all" : "false",
        "index" : "no",
        "properties" : {
'

# this data is used for facetting END
json+='
            "id" : { "type" : "long", "include_in_all" : "true" },
            "BDC_CODE" : { "type" : "byte" },
            "KID" : { "type" : "byte" },
            "ITEM_STANDARDIZATION_CODE" : { "type" : "string" },
'

# we don't know what these field's data look like yet
json+='
            "stock_on_hand" : { "type" : "integer" },
            "non_stocked_items" : { "type" : "integer" },
            "stocked_restrictions" : { "type" : "string" },
            "consistency_of_spend" : { "type" : "string" },
            "WSDC" : { "type" : "string" }
        }
    }
}'

url='http://ec2-54-234-64-66.compute-1.amazonaws.com:9200/nsns/nsn/_mapping?pretty=true'

curl -XPOST "$url" -d "$json"

Note that += is a bash-specific string concatenating assignment operator.

This is a great alternative solution to my question. Thanks for the general insights into shell scripts. I'm new to them. — T. Brian Jones, Jan 10 '13 at 07:15

Adding comments inside single quotes in a shell script?

2 Answers2