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    Instead of a command I just use a #, which works as long as you have not told your shell to ignore comment lines. Commented Mar 20, 2013 at 15:18
  • @jw013 That's a good approach too to reduce typing, but I was shooting for an option that was shell-agnostic. Commented Mar 20, 2013 at 15:26
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    I think # is a comment character in every shell that I have seen, even weird ones like csh. It's even in the POSIX spec (see item 10.). I'd love to know if you've seen shells where # is not a comment. Commented Mar 20, 2013 at 15:38
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    It's not in zsh in interactive mode (by default): ➜ #ls zsh: command not found: #ls Commented Mar 20, 2013 at 15:46
  • I have always used echo as the command for this. This can cause issues if your weird characters interpreted by the shell, like * or !, so I often times go with the single quotes around it all as well. Commented Mar 20, 2013 at 17:51