Joe Altman asked about this section for the man page:
| Don't put comments on the regular expression condition lines in a
| recipe, these lines are fed to the internal egrep literally (except
| for continuation backslashes at the end of a line).
Sean Straw and Ken Irving have already explained it: if a condition line is
a regexp, don't put a comment to the right of the regexp because procmail
will take the octothorpe and the text of the comment as part of the regexp
rather than ignoring them as a comment. If it's an exit code test, a comment
to the right doesn't hurt. If it's a size test, well, I really don't know.
I think the confusion is that "comment on the line" can be read as "comment
about the line," but Stephen meant "comment that is positioned on the line."
| Is it the case that procmail parses the comment on the flag line, and
| skips condition and action line(s)?
I'm not sure how to parse that question. Trailing comments are safe on flag
lines and do not make procmail skip the condition and action lines. Trailing
comments are also allowed on action lines. Until a few versions ago, whole-
line comments had to be placed between recipes (or between an assignment and
a recipe or between two assignments) and could not be placed between lines
of a recipe, but such interspersion is permitted now. As Sean said, though,
those of us who have been using procmail since the days when that was forbid-
den tend not to do it.
DWT (disappointed that the word is "interspersion" and not "interspersal")
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