What is the function of the following lines at the top of a shell script file: Directory and Script?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

The file starts like this:

Directory: <path to the script>
Script: <script fife name>

#!bin/ksh

##Comments

<actual script>

What is the use of the first two lines in the script? What if I save the file without them? What will be the effect? They are not comments. Im very new to this, please help!

2

The first line of a script should be the shebang #! which it says what program is supposed to run the script when you make the file executable and run it as ./script.sh

However the script can be run as:
ksh script.sh

If you remove the shebang that's the only option you have.
Anything that starts with just a # (except the #! , when is the first line) will be ignored as commands. They are just human readable comments.

I am assuming that the following does not exist in your actual script, since that will be incorrect.

Directory: <path to the script>
Script: <script fife name>

Note that your #!bin/ksh should be #!/bin/ksh if your ksh shell lives there.

3

Thank you for the quick reply. I have removed these lines from my code. But I see working scripts which have them. Its strange though, because I do get the error of command not found for these lines.

Thanks a lot!

4

No surprise as these "commands" really don't exist. Didn't this error msgs make you suspicious?

5

I believe that Directory: and Script: may be keywords in ksh93 used for creating libraries of scripts that can be loaded as shell built-ins.

Although in bash the command line:

Directory: date

will give you a diagnostic similar to:

bash: Directory:: command not found

that same command (and:

Script: date

or:

name: date

for any other name) in ksh93 (at least the Korn shell on OS X with version information: sh (AT&T Research) 93u+ 2012-08-01 ) will print the current date and time.

Note that the standards specify that the name of a utility (and the name of a variable and several other names) is "a word consisting solely of underscores, digits, and alphabetics from the portable character set. The first character of a name is not a digit." So the standards allow shells to produce unspecified results when a utility name contains a colon. (It appears that ksh93 does assign some meaning to names ending with a colon [names containing a colon other than as the last character don't seem to be treated specially], but I haven't found any description of exactly what those results are intended to be in the man page.)

Some of you who have been around as long as I have may also remember that some early shells (pre-Bourne) used a string ending with a colon appearing at the start of a line as a label that could be jumped to with a:

goto label

command. I believe the Mashey shell was the 1st to deprecate the goto command and the Bourne shell was the first shell that did not include a goto command.