ForgotPasswordAgain has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

In perlrun, it mentions:
If the #! line does not contain the word "perl" nor the word "indir", the program named after the #! is executed instead of the Perl interpreter.
I found with git that "indir" support was added in a cleanup commit for Perl 5.0 in 1994 and was mentioned in perlrun in 2012. Just out of curiousity, what is "indir" referring to?

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Re: "indir" in shebang line
by Discipulus (Canon) on Nov 21, 2017 at 09:40 UTC
    uh uh ForgotPasswordAgain what dark corner you encountered!

    This indir shebang thing is handled in toke.c

    I found here that indir was a program to call indirectly other programs:

    If I recall correctly, 'indir' was a program designed to indirectly 
execute other programs.  My recollection is that it was supposed to be
+ 
particularly useful in setuid situations where the OS didn't natively 
provide you much help, and/or perhaps in situations where the OS kerne
+l 
limited you to 32 character command lines.

> Personally I wouldn't object to the removal of this exec feature. Bu
+t
> at the very least shouldn't we document that "indir" thing ?

I don't think indir is actively maintained, and we don't recommend
doing setuid scripts this way anymore either, so removing the 'indir' 
special case is probably appropriate.

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    L*

    There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
    Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.
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      Thanks, that was it exactly. (I really love how you said I encountered a dark corner. :)
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Re: "indir" in shebang line
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 21, 2017 at 09:40 UTC
[reply]
      Thanks, the p5p link is what I was looking for.
[reply]
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