Comments Ending in Backslash also Comment following Command

[aubaugh]

Comments ending in backslashes prevent the following command from running. Is this intended behavior?

example:
  # following command won't run \
  echo Hello World!

[laniakea64]

Yes. Because to just, the recipe body is lines of arbitrary text to pass to the shell. And the backslash joins the two lines into one line. So the shell would see

# following command won't run echo Hello World!

which is one big shell comment and doesn't contain any command, so nothing should run.

[casey]

Yah, that's correct, although I can definitely see why it's potentially confusing.