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

Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Thu, 20 Feb 1997 12:43:16 -0500


Date: Thu, 20 Feb 1997 10:14:56 -0500
From: worley@ariadne.com (Dale R. Worley)

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.

Why not implement it as #?perl, and define a new binfmt interpreter
which rewrites it as #!/usr/bin/perl (or whatever), and then calls the
#! interpreter? Having binfmt interpreters do a bit of prework and then
call another interpreter is how binfmt_java is implemented, after all.

This way, we avoid the conflict altogether.

- Ted