Syntax highlighting Problem in for Bash

[Tom Bodine]

I was bitten by the old
unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"'
error in bash. Where you start a comment some where in the middle of
your script and forget to place a quote mark at the end. After
searching through the text I could not find any string that matched
this criteria. It was only when I loaded the script into SciTE that I
could see that this text was the problem

<script>
# Syntax.........: libraryCheck [-test] {executable}
# Parameters ....: executable - an Executable and Linkable Formated
file
: -test : just do the test but don't fail on error
# Return values .: 0 on success, exits if libraries not found

</script>

Even though the third line appears as executable text to Bash, to me
it looks like part of the comment in the other lines. Vim did not help
me here since it colors the line starting with the colon the same as
the line starting with the hash mark. In order to find the problem I
loaded the script into Scite.

Where as Scite treats lines starting with colons correctly and leaves
them colored like regular text, Vim colors them the same as comments
( those lines wich start with hash marks).

How can I change Vim's syntax coloring to treat lines starting with
colons differently from those starting with hash marks?

Thanks and Regards Tom Bodine

[Tony Mechelynck]

In bash (as can be seen with "help :" without the quotes at the bash
prompt) : is a do-nothing command. So it can be regarded as legitimate
to treat it as a comment. Actually, in the current
$VIMRUNTIME/syntax/sh.vim (version 118 dated Aug 16, 2011 and applying
to all three of sh, bash and ksh) these "colon lines" are set to syntax
group shColon at line 287, then at line 536 the shColon highlight group
is linked to shComment which is in turn linked to Comment at line 612.

So a colorscheme could highlight colon lines as something else than a
comment by changing the highlight for the shColon highlight group.

AFAICT from reading :help ft-bash-syntax there is no setting to change
those default highlights. However the fact that the sh syntax script
makes no provision for quoted strings extending on more than one line
can be regarded as a bug (or as a limitation). I'm CC-ing Charles "Dr.
Chip" Campbell, the current maintainer of that script.

Best regards,
Tony.
--
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
203. You're an active member of more than 20 newsgroups.

[Gary Johnson]

On 2011-10-21, Tony Mechelynck wrote:

> In bash (as can be seen with "help :" without the quotes at the bash
> prompt) : is a do-nothing command. So it can be regarded as
> legitimate to treat it as a comment.

While it is true that the : command does nothing, its arguments are
still expanded, redirections are performed, and it sets the exit
code to 0, so it is not true that it can be regarded as a comment
line.

As a practical example, this command tests USER and if it is unset
or empty, sets it to the output of whoami.

: ${USER:=`whoami`}

Regards,
Gary