On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, Emmanuel Dreyfus wrote:

: > : > Further, the error message printed when you run such a binary is totally
: > : > unhelpful.
: > The best solution is to fix shells so they will not run scripts `manually'
: > by default if exec*() returns ENOEXEC.  Scripts properly prepended with a
: > magic number (the #! marker) will be started up by the kernel as expected
: > anyway; only those scripts with no magic number would fail.  This would weed
: > out the possibility of running a foreign binary as a script.
:
: Well the problem here is that we don't maintain local versions of all
: shells. bash, tcsh or zsh are not in our CVS, for instance.

This is well known, but we have *no* way to fix the more detailed situation
I described without fixing things through whatever shells we are able to
fix.  It is the shells' fault for executing anything that exec*() fails on
as a script, after all.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.
-- NetBSD 1.5 now available on CD-ROM  --  http://www.wasabisystems.com/