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

Will French (wfrench@interport.net)
Thu, 20 Feb 1997 16:36:11 -0500 (EST)


>> 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.

Well, I can't think of anything better than the question mark
I used above. It's a wildcard, so it's unlikely to be used in a
filename; the only people who would be bothered by this are
those who use wildcards in the names of their executables _and_
refer to those executables with relative paths in '#!' lines.
The only way I can see to entirely avoid this ambiguity would be
to supplement '#!' with some other string (perhaps '#?'), but
perhaps someone somewhere has written a script whose first line
is a comment starting with that string.

Will French <wfrench@interport.net>