The following reply was made to PR misc/23729; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: christos@zoulas.com (Christos Zoulas)
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org, misc-bug-people@netbsd.org,
	gnats-admin@netbsd.org, netbsd-bugs@netbsd.org, refling@acm.org
Cc: 
Subject: Re: misc/23729: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006 22:10:15 -0400

 On Oct 8,  1:10am, dholland@eecs.harvard.edu (David Holland) wrote:
 -- Subject: Re: misc/23729: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
 
 | The following reply was made to PR misc/23729; it has been noted by GNATS.
 | 
 | From: dholland@eecs.harvard.edu (David Holland)
 | To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
 | Cc: 
 | Subject: Re: misc/23729: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
 | Date: Sat, 7 Oct 2006 21:07:25 -0400 (EDT)
 | 
 |  As of now, the only widely used shells that try to run files that
 |  won't exec() are sh and ksh. All the others fail, which you can verify
 |  by taking your favorite hello.c, compiling, and then editing the
 |  binary to replace "ld_elf.so" with, say, "ld_alf.so". This produces
 |  these results:
 |  
 |     % csh -c ./hullo 
 |     ./hullo: Exec format error. Wrong Architecture.
 |  
 |     % bash -c ./hullo 
 |     bash: ./hullo: cannot execute binary file
 |  
 |     % tcsh -c ./hullo 
 |     ./hullo: Exec format error. Binary file not executable.
 |  
 |     % zsh -c ./hullo 
 |     zsh: exec format error: ./hullo
 |  
 |  and
 |  
 |     % sh -c ./hullo 
 |     ./hullo: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
 |  
 |     % ksh -c ./hullo 
 |     ./hullo: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
 |  
 |  The behavior exhibited by sh and ksh is historic, but hasn't been
 |  useful since #! was invented, which was a long time ago.
 |  
 |  Probably the best thing to do is to remove it.
 
 And what happens to shell scripts that don't start with #!?
 
 christos