Re^2: (OT) Fixing Line Endings

The #!...\n line at the beginning of an executable file on a Unix system is recognised as telling the kernel that this is a script, to be passed to the interepreter named in the ... part.

If the line is '#!/usr/bin/perl\r\n' (as it would be on a Windows box), the kernel will attempt to find a file called '/usr/bin/perl\r'.

It's a hilarious (but real) solution.

Comment on Re^2: (OT) Fixing Line Endings

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Re^3: (OT) Fixing Line Endings by Melly (Chaplain) on Nov 30, 2006 at 14:56 UTC
Ah! Tnx. Hmm... couldn't you create a perl script /usr/bin/perl\\r and have that handle the problem? Tom Melly, pm@tomandlu.co.uk	[reply]
Re^4: (OT) Fixing Line Endings by jbert (Priest) on Nov 30, 2006 at 15:09 UTC
Creating the symlinks is an even lighter-weight way of doing it.	[reply]
Re^4: (OT) Fixing Line Endings by Anonymous Monk on Nov 30, 2006 at 15:45 UTC
Hmm... couldn't you create a perl script /usr/bin/perl\\r and have that handle the problem? That's essentially what they did. A symbolic link is a UNIX way of saying: "this file is the same as that file over there". They're like Perl references, only for a file system. The real problem was getting the symlink command to run from the shell command line: eventually, they gave up, and used perl instead...	[reply]