Comments within a shell pipeline

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I've got a very ugly pipeline for analyzing web server logs (but nevermind the application; I've come across this in other scripts as well). I want to nicely comment the steps in the pipeline, but I can't seem to do it.

I know, for instance that in csh/sh/bash, a # begins a comment, and any subsequent \ or | will be ignored. I've tried playing with : but to little avail (I'm using bash v3.1).

Here's a sample of the pipeline:

cat /var/log/access_fille \
| grep '".*" 4[0-9][0-9] ' \
| grep -v ' /favicon.ico ' \
| grep -o '".*" 4[0-9][0-9] ' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | tee $tmpfile

Can you see why I might want to comment these steps?

2 
grep '".*" 4[0-9][0-9] ' /var/log/access_file | ## COMMENT
 grep -v ' /favicon.ico ' | ## COMMENT
  grep -o '".*" 4[0-9][0-9] ' | ## COMMENT
   sort | ## COMMENT
    uniq -c | ## COMMENT
     sort -n | ## COMMENT
      tail | ## COMMENT
       tee "$tmpfile"
3

Thanks!!