On 2012-07-16, Philippe Verdy <[email protected]> wrote: > I am also convinced that even Shell interpreters on Linux/Unix should > recognize and accept the leading BOM before the hash/bang starting > line (which is commonly used for filetype identification and runtime > behavior), without claiming that they don"t know what to do to run the > file or which shell interpreter to use.
Do you think they should also recognize and accept ISO-2022 escape sequences before the hashbang? If not, why not? The kernel doesn't know or care about character sets. It has a little knowledge of ASCII (or possibly EBCDIC) hardwired, but otherwise it deals with 8-bit bytes. It has no concept of "text file". A file to be interpreted by a hashbang could in principle contain arbitrary binary stuff, be that text in multiple encodings or just binary data. That stuff belongs to the input to the interpreter, not to the hashbang line: that line contains a filename which is not intepreted in any extended charset. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
