echo “#!” fails — “event not found”

Question

The following fails and I don\'t understand why:

$ echo \"#!\"

the following also fails with the same error message:

$ echo         


        

Answer 1

By default, bash supports csh compatible history-expansion.

In bash

echo #!

will only print a newline, as # starts a comment.

In

echo "#!"

the # is part of the string started with ". Such strings are still inspected by bash for special characters. ! is a special character iff it is followed by any other text.

-bash: !": event not found

In this case, bash expects the !" token to refer to a previous command in shell history starting with ", and does not find one. All by itself, ! will not trigger this behaviour:

$ echo \# !
# !

$ echo fee ! fie
fee ! fie

Finally,

$ echo !echo

produces two lines, the first line is printed by the shell to show how the pattern above expands to:

echo echo '# !'

while the second line is just the result of executing the expanded command: echo # !

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See Also: The Bash man page on History Expansion