Gordon Messmer <gordon.messmer at gmail.com> wrote: > I'm reasonably certain that a script with no shebang will run with > /bin/sh. I interpret your statement to mean that if a user is using ksh > and enters the path to such a script, it would also run in ksh. That > would only be true if you "sourced" the script from your shell. The historical way is: there is only one shell and all scripts are Bourne Shell scripts. Then csh came out and some people really thought is was a good idea to write csh scripts. So someone decided to mark csh scripts with an initial "#". Note that at that time, the Bourne Shell did not support "#" as a comment sign and thus scripts with an inital "#" have been illegal Bourne Shell scripts. Later BSD came out with #!name and all but AT&T adopted to this. In the mid 1980s, AT&T introduced an initial ":" to mark Bourne Shell scripts. In 1989, with the beginning of SVr4, even AT&T introduced #!name, but the AT&T variant of the OS did not correct their scripts, so if you are on a UnixWare installation, you will have fun. Unfortunately, POSIX cannot standardize #!name. This is because POSIX does not standardize PATHs and because the scripts marked that way would need to be scripts that call the POSIX shell. The official method to get a POSIX shell is to call this: sh # to make sure you have a Bourne Shell alike PATH=`getconf PATH` # to get a POSIX compliant PATH sh # to get a POSIX shell, that muust be the first # 'sh' in the POSIX PATH /bin/sh definitely does not start a POSIX shell..... Jörg -- EMail:joerg at schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/'