(This is the story as I heard it and learned it in the past. It may ormay not be actually accurate, but then a lot of Unix history is passedaround as folklore, and in some ways the folklore is more important andmore influential than the truth.)

In the beginning, in V7, the Bourne shell didn't actually havecomments. Instead, all it had was : , which is not quite a comment (you can see this for yourself in the V7 shmanpage

I don't know how people learn the Bourne shell these days, but when Ilearned it, I first encountered ' : ' as a vaguely peculiar second wayof writing comments, one used by some old shell scripts that hung aroundour systems. This is true as far as it goes, which is not necessarilyvery far.

The difference between # and : is that # starts a real commentthat runs to the end of the line, while : is a real command thatjust does nothing (this is

OpenSSH has decent basic support for opportunistic connection sharing , but most of this is that ssh will look for anexisting master connection before making a new one. It could do betterand enable a true opportunistic connection sharing mode.

There's two problems with ssh's current support for this, one big andone small. First, being the master connection can keep your ssh running when it would otherwise exit. Second, the master connectionexits immediately when there's no active sessions running over it;there'