On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Jeff Squyres <jsquy...@cisco.com> wrote:
> On Sep 24, 2009, at 12:46 PM, Mike Dubman wrote: > > Im not familiar with :\n semantics, how does it force Bourne shell and >> what it actually does :)? (seems like leftovers from 1960....) >> > > Yes, it might be left over from 1960. :-) But the nice thing is that you > then don't have to identify /bin/sh or /usr/bin/sh. It's convenient and it > works everywhere. Found some info re ":\n" as a shebang line: ... ':' was actually the first comment character. All shells I tried still recognize it as such, so it is not obsolete, but perhaps slightly deprecated. The first versions of csh used '#' as a comment and used the presence of one comment character or the other to decide which shell to run (assuming it was given a text file with the execute bit set). This was before the advent of the kernel-based #! "magic number" The early "/bin/sh" versions assumed they were the only shell on the system and had no need to choose an interpreter. ...
