From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: meillo@marmaro.de (markus schnalke)
Date: Mon, 12 Sep 2016 10:35:37 +0200
Subject: [TUHS] Shell control through external commands
In-Reply-To: <201609101922.u8AJMmtq024477@freefriends.org>
References: <201607151647.u6FGlqvW037575@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU>
 <20160910174011.GF5970@dnied%tiscali.it>
 <201609101922.u8AJMmtq024477@freefriends.org>
Message-ID: <1bjMiH-10N-00@marmaro.de>

[2016-09-10 13:22] arnold at skeeve.com
> Dario Niedermann <dnied at tiscali.it> wrote:
> >
> > I never knew that a shell script could work without a shebang line.
>
> That was the simplicity of the original system, where you just made the
> file executable. The shell would fork and exec as usual.  When the exec
> failed, the shell noticed that errno was ENOEXEC (not a runnable file)
> and started interpreting the script itself.

I think I've seen many eary (pre-Shebang and even pre-#-comment)
shell scripts start with a colon. Is this only a coincidence with
having a comment at the beginning or was the colon character magic
in some way?


meillo