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From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Ts'o)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: PERL mucks with "magic number?"
Message-ID: <1990May8.220641.20501@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 8 May 90 22:06:41 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu
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   From: rm55+@andrew.cmu.edu (Rudolph T. Maceyko)
   Date: 7 May 90 18:08:01 GMT

   Hi.  I'm trying to use PERL in a multiple-machine (VAX, rt, sun)
   environment, same OS, though (Andrew, if you know it).  Anyway,
   because of symlink resolution and kernel limits on #! pathnames, my
   PERL scripts began with

   #!/bin/csh -f

   eval "exec /usr/contributed/bin/perl -S $0 $*"
	   if $running_under_some_shell;

Yup, my scripts used to do the same thing, for the same reason.  (It's
nice to know I'm not alone....)  When I commented about this (in this
very forum), I got back comments of "fix your kernel" (hah!) and "that's
gross don't do that".  I am told that the reason why perl does this is
because of some obscure security reason....

If you don't believe me, try this: "perl <name of bourne shell script>"
and watch perl use /bin/sh as the interpreter of the shell script.
Granted this is a nice feature, but if I invoke "perl perl_script", I
generally want perl to be the interpreter --- no questions asked.

How about 'perl "-Yes, I Really Want To Use Perl" perl_script'?  :-)
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Theodore Ts'o				bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso
3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139		tytso@athena.mit.edu
   Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!