env bug ?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Mar 07, 2005 at 07:50:16PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:
> A very careful reading of the execve(2) manpage (on a somewhat old Red
> Hat) indicates that the contents of the #! line are #!, the full pathname
> of an interpreter, and optionally an argument.  Note, "argument", singular
> not plural.  So all the remaining text on the line is being taken as *one*
> argument.
> 
> This is actually quite a common restriction; supplying more than one
> argument on the #! line has never been very portable. 

I guess that is why things like perl have their own way to go back and
reread the first line of the script to pick up any missed arguments.

> I concur.
> 
> I wouldn't go that far... quite.  I would say that the kernel is handling
> an out-of-spec situation rather ungracefully.  It isn't actually wrong but
> really ought to do better.

It works on my kernel, so I suspect the system in question simply
doens't have a real program called echo in the path.  Most people
wouldn't notice since bash includes a shell built in for echo.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml