Shell script multi-line comment

Question

I am having a large shell script file. At times while doing modification I want to comment out part of it. But commenting line as shown in the below example is giving me e

Answer 1

First, using here docs to comment code is really dirty! Use the # instead. If you want to comment multiple lines, use your editor. In vim (commenting lines from 10 to 15 for example):

:10,15s/^/#

However, to solve your current problem you need to enclose the starting here-doc delimiter in single quotes, like this:

<<'COMMENT'
...
COMMENT

Using single quotes you tell bash that it should not attempt to expand variables or expression inside the here doc body.