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From: dave@galaxia.Newport.RI.US (David H. Brierley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: portability of non-shell scripts
Keywords: portability
Message-ID: <1136@galaxia.Newport.RI.US>
Date: 18 Jan 91 02:32:27 GMT
References: <1991Jan15.233523.18150@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Organization: Dave's Very Own Personal System
Lines: 24

In article <1991Jan15.233523.18150@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> phil@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Phil Howard KA9WGN) writes:
[ talks about problems when using #! construct ]
...
>... Has anyone worked a general way to make
>these script programs more portable so that they will run w/o having to
>have the user do editing on them?

How do you plan on having this work "portably" on systems that don't
support the #! mechanism?  The only thing I know of that is even close
to being portable is to assume that your script will be run by one of
the shell interpreters and have the first line of the file exec the
program that you really want run.  Make sure that you dont have anything
on this first line that is sh/ksh/csh specific because I can't gaurantee
what shell will be used to run your script.

This is one of those problems that has no real solution short of forcing
everyone to upgrade to a version of the kernel that supports the #!
mechanism (yes, the #! mechanism is implemented *inside the kernel*!!).
Since you can make a pretty good guess as to what the odds of this happening
are you can apply those same odds to coming up with a solution.
-- 
David H. Brierley
Home: dave@galaxia.Newport.RI.US    Work: dhb@quahog.ssd.ray.com
Can I be excused, my brain is full.