11 Sep
2016
11 Sep
'16
8:41 a.m.
On Sep 10, 2016, at 10:39 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com
wrote:
"Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
You are correct.
Traditionally, the shell recognized shell scripts
and ran them in a new
instance of the shell rather than calling exec on them.
I think that the way the shell "recognized" scripts was by having
exec fail, otherwise how would it know? I think we'll have to go
grubbing in the source archives to be sure. It was a Berkeley hack to add a new exec magic
number that happened to
correspond to the characters #!.
ISTR reading on this list that #! was a post-V7 Bell Labs invention
that the BSD guys went and implemented themselves...