Shell Help
In keeping with my simple approach to documentation in makefiles I do the same thing in shell scripts with this implementation:
#_# help
#_# Print this helpful message
do_help() {
sed -n 's/^#_#/ /p' "$0"
}
The function name follows the mode-function pattern.
In principle this approach works for any language that uses #
to start a line comment, such as Python or Perl, though there are much more capable modules available in those contexts. But for shell it gives me what I need, basic functionality in simple implementation.