Re: seduid scripts

[Stephen Usher <steve@earth.ox.ac.uk>]

>Basically, because we already have one path separator (\). Introducing
>another one is messy, especially since GEMDOS has historically allowed
>/ in file names (indeed many users have files with names like
>"2/12/92". I realize that Unix aware people would never do such a silly
>thing, but unfortunately lots of ST users are not Unix aware. If I were
>designing TOS from scratch I would use / as the path separator, but
>unfortunately it's much too late for that.

This is true for all cases except this one. #! is a derivative of Unix, it
has nothing to do with TOS, scripts with it at the top assume they are
running under Unix, hence they will not be refering to filenames with
forward slashes in them.

>Also, by not using / for anything in the kernel, we provide a way to
>represent Unix file names containing \; namely, a Posix library could
>simply swap / and \ everywhere they occur in file names..

This is not the case here, for a library exec to do what you ask it will
have to read the file header, rewrite it, call exec and then somehow change
it back again! This is a specific case where "it should be in the library"
doesn't work.

The #! line should be thought of as the file's magic number, it tells the
kernel what type of executable it is, and hence what to do with it. It is a
special case.

Steve

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