Re: "What is the !@#$ pathname of Perl on *this* machine?"

Aaron Crane (AC8@soas.ac.uk)
Thu, 20 Feb 1997 17:21:45 GMT


Dale R. Worley wrote:
> From: Will French <wfrench@interport.net>
>
> Why do you assume that "people never write relative paths into
> '#!' lines"? I just tried it, and it works quite well; perhaps
> there is someone somewhere who depends on it. I suggest having
> a special prefix, such as "#!?perl", to tell your code to look
> up perl in the list.
>
> Well, I've never seen nor heard of anyone writing relative paths.
>
> But I do like the idea of having a special prefix character. What
> characters do you think would be good? Of course, there are no
> characters which are invalid for pathname (other than NUL), so we
> still can't avoid messing up something that someone might be doing
> somewhere.

Correct me if I'm wrong: other unices don't understand these registered
interpreters, so we can do something that isn't backward-compatible. Like
adding a new binfmt, say "#?", for using registered interpreters.

But for that matter, I *haven't* ever seen a relative path used for an
interpreter, so I don't think that "#!perl" is really a loss.
-- Aaron Crane <aaronc@pobox.com>, <http://pobox.com/~aaronc/>
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