How to comment out particular lines in a shell script at a time

Question

Can anyone suggest how to comment particular lines in the shell script?

Suppose I have a script of 500 lines and I want to comment 150 lines (from "300 to 450"), How to comment it at a time?

I'd probably use `sed` (not really, awk), here's an example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36149036/find-and-replace-text-in-a-file-between-range-of-lines-using-sed — James Brown, May 10 '19 at 08:12

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered May 10 '19 at 08:09

If you use vi as your text editor you could use

:300,450s/^/#&/

This will prepend # to all lines from 300 to 450.

Or you could go to the first line you want to comment, mark it with label a using

:ma

then go to the last line and enter

:a,.s/^/#&/

This will do the same substitution from the line marked with a to the current line

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 10 '19 at 08:13

1

Yeah, I got the solution

In Notepad++, select the lines you want to comment out. Press ctrl+K , it will put # before the line.

answered May 10 '19 at 08:13

Aditya Dhanraj

Yeah, its a shell script, I am using Notepad++ as a TextEditor. – Aditya Dhanraj May 10 '19 at 08:16
Thanks @James Brown Your answer is really helpful – Aditya Dhanraj May 10 '19 at 08:17

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 10 '19 at 08:12

Many text editors provide feature of recording macros. I specifically find this fearure easy in Notepad++.

Here is a good tutorial if you want to understand more about it:

So for you to avoid reworking:

Rocord a macro that

1.) goes to begin of the line

2.) adds a #

3.) changes the cursor to new line

and then you can run it for 150 times in one click,when you are at line number 300.

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 10 '19 at 08:28

0

perl -ne 'if(($.>300)&&($.<450)){print "#$_"} else {print}' yourfilename

This iterates over the lines and if the line number is in the range you specify, prepends a #.

answered May 10 '19 at 08:28

user1717259

4 Answers4