Huh, that is funky. Fingers crossed mine survives. I think I’ll go and set up some backups, now that I think about it.

Easy way to avoid this: choose a different port. I think it’s a safe bet the crawlers are just checking 25565. I’ve had a server up for months with zero issues.

The wall of shame is fantastic, thanks for sharing it.

You’re probably best off writing the awk script in its own file instead of straight on the command line. Then you can comment to your heart’s content without shell limitations. If you really want to do it inline, you might be able to do a $(# comment in a subshell). I remember doing something like that in the past, but I’m not near a computer to check right now.