[TUHS] Shell control through external commands

[markus schnalke]

[2016-09-10 13:22] arnold at skeeve.com
> Dario Niedermann <dnied at tiscali.it> wrote:
> >
> > I never knew that a shell script could work without a shebang line.
>
> That was the simplicity of the original system, where you just made the
> file executable. The shell would fork and exec as usual.  When the exec
> failed, the shell noticed that errno was ENOEXEC (not a runnable file)
> and started interpreting the script itself.

I think I've seen many eary (pre-Shebang and even pre-#-comment)
shell scripts start with a colon. Is this only a coincidence with
having a comment at the beginning or was the colon character magic
in some way?


meillo