11 Sep
2016
11 Sep
'16
8:39 a.m.
"Ron Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
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...
Can someone who was there please clarify?
Thanks,
Arnold