Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!sri-unix!quintus!pds
From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Ban the Cloud! (plus sugg. for Workbench)
Message-ID: <744@sandino.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 8 Mar 88 18:35:31 GMT
References: <YW8SaQy00Xo4yUc05z@andrew.cmu.edu> <318@jc3b21.UUCP> <43704@sun.uucp> <209@xenlink.UUCP>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 32
Summary: Sort of a default tool, non?

In article <209@xenlink.UUCP>, theo@xenlink.UUCP (Theo deRaadt) writes:
> I think that
> we need some way of specifying what execution environment a program is
> supposed to run in. Take Unix for example. If the first 2 bytes work
> out to "#!" it will parse the rest of that line for a program name, and
> pipe (maybe -c it?) the rest of the file into that program.

Sounds useful.  So you could start a file

#! execute

for DOS files and 

#! shell

for cshell scripts.  Sort of a default tool, a la workbench, non?  Sure,
sounds good.  Except for two things.  First, we already have the
workbench default tool, why invent another thing (assuming that we
have merged .icon files for time and space savings)?  And secondly,
this facility assumes that whatever program is being invoked recognizes
# as a comment character.  Not everything does.  The C compiler, for
example.  AmigaDOS, if I'm not mistaken.  You could change it from # to
whatever you want, but all programs to be invoked by this program would
have to share a comment character, and that seems pretty much
impossible.

Unless you work out a way to skip the first line when passing the file
to the program.
-- 
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
...!sun!quintus!pds