In the pursuit of something itself worthy of a (future) blog post, I foud myself wanting to have “exeuctable” markdown files.

TL;DR [ \]; exec <COMMAND> $0 "$@"; ]:#

Try it! curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thejcannon/joshcannon.me/refs/heads/main/scripts/magic-word.md | sh

(or save it to a file, chmod +x it, then run it)

What the hell? #

Figuring out the puzzle is left as an exercise for the reader, but I’ll present two key pieces of information:

  1. [ <anything> ]:# is a valid Markdown comment
    • You cannot put a space between the ] and the :
  2. [ is not Bash syntax, it is a program. (man [ if you don’t believe me)

Enjoy!