In article <Pine.WNT.4.33.0108051304010.952-100000@todd>,
Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com> wrote:
>
>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.
>
>This can cause some breakage, so the impact of such change would need to be
>assessed first.  It might be useful as a shell `internal config variable' in
>some cases.

Many shells are smart and check if the file contains ascii data before
executing it.

christos