[TUHS] History of #! interpretation in Unix

John Cowan cowan at mercury.ccil.org
Mon Jan 17 03:17:15 AEST 2011


Sven Mascheck scripsit:

> As you mention "shebangs began .. as csh-only hack":
> I still wonder if one may call the BSD csh-hack as origin,
> because #! might have been developed independently at Bell Labs.

No, that would be too much of a coincidence to choose exactly the
same characters.  There has to be a single point of origin, from
which it spread by stimulus diffusion (you hear there are telescopes,
you know they use lenses, you build your own telescope).

> I thought sh-like shells in general try to interprete scripts themselves
> upon an ENOEXEC.  Do you know certain shells which actually call "/bin/sh"?

Yes, seemingly bash does that too.  Bogus.

-- 
John Cowan    cowan at ccil.org    http://ccil.org/~cowan
The whole of Gaul is quartered into three halves.
        --Julius Caesar



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