On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Jeff Squyres <jsquyres_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Sep 24, 2009, at 12:46 PM, Mike Dubman wrote:
>
> Im not familiar with :\n semantics, how does it force Bourne shell and
>> what it actually does :)? (seems like leftovers from 1960....)
>>
>
> Yes, it might be left over from 1960. :-) But the nice thing is that you
> then don't have to identify /bin/sh or /usr/bin/sh. It's convenient and it
> works everywhere.
Found some info re ":\n" as a shebang line:
...
':' was actually the first comment character.
All shells I tried still recognize it as such, so it is not obsolete, but
perhaps slightly deprecated.
The first versions of csh used '#' as a comment and used the presence of one
comment character or the other to decide which shell to run (assuming it was
given a text file with the execute bit set). This was before the advent of
the kernel-based #! "magic number"
The early "/bin/sh" versions assumed they were the only shell on the system
and had no need to choose an interpreter.
...
|