Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: make importing SHELL
Message-ID: <4164@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 1 Oct 88 03:38:07 GMT
References: <452@alice.marlow.uucp> <67870@sun.uucp> <67925@sun.uucp> <128@cetia.UUCP> <13753@mimsy.UUCP> <4147@bsu-cs.UUCP> <7350@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 19

In article <7350@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum)
writes:
>$SHELL is useful for programs which support escapes to the user's shell
>and shell commands from within the program.  in those situations the user
>should get the desired shell and #! would not have added in doing the
>right thing.

This information is already available in /etc/passwd and, with the help
of the dbm routines in 4.3BSD, available very quickly.

I'll admit that on rare occasions a user might want to override this
information, and $SHELL might be a way to do this.

But $SHELL seems to be the only automatic mechanism under System V to
allow the user to specify which shell should be used to interpret a
script.  Therefore my original claim, that $SHELL is a poor
substitute for #!, is relevant.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi