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Comments on how do I get markdown to render # as a shell prompt and not a comment?

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how do I get markdown to render # as a shell prompt and not a comment?

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Note: This is a general question about Markdown formatting for any Markdown renderer (e.g., Gitlab, Github, Codidact). So this is not just a question about Codidact's renderer.

When displaying shell commands in Markdown, I often want to use the hash sign (#) to indicate that I am running the command as root. However, Markdown renderers usually interpret the # character as the beginning of a comment, which results in the entire line being rendered as a comment (usually in the color gray).

For example, using the shell code fence (```sh), the following command is rendered as intended with colors:

echo hi

However, if I precede that command with #, the Markdown interpreter thinks the entire line is a comment:

# echo hi

Is there anyway to tell Markdown to ignore/exclude the # character?

markdown syntax-highlighting
posted 6 days ago
4d ago by Monica Cellio‭
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1 comment thread

Markdown does not do highlighting (2 comments)
Markdown does not do highlighting
Moshi‭ wrote 5 days ago
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Markdown does provide a way to do a code block with metadata using the backtick syntax, but it does not actually describe either what the metadata describes, nor how highlighting is handled.

This means highlighting is implementation-specific.

Codidact and StackExchange use highlight.js to highlight code blocks.

GitHub uses it's own highlighter called linguist

Note that these two are tools used in addition to the Markdown engine and are not a part of either Markdown implementation.

Andreas witnessed the end of the world today‭ wrote 4 days ago · edited 4 days ago
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With this in mind, I don't the think the question really lives up to the standards as of now. The answer still seems useful, though, just for a different question. The question in its current form needs an overhaul; rather large one. Potentially split it into two: one Q/A for the explanation for how code highlighting in Markdown works, and another one for the specific case of sh vs shell/console. Due to the way the question is currently composed, it has limited reusability.