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SRFI-22 -- What won't work

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 22 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 22 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



* Point one: Sharp-bang is not recursive
----------------------------------------
    From: Marc Feeley <feeley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
    Well it could be the executable for the interpreter, but it could also
    be a shell script that execs the appropriate underlying interpreter
    (Gambit, Scheme48, etc) after doing some administrative checks (that
    the user has permission to run the interpreter, logging the use of
    a Scheme script, or whatever).  For example, I can perfectly imagine
    Gambit's interpreter to reside in "gsi" and "scheme-script"
    is a shell script like this

       #! /bin/sh
       ... parse command line options BUT DON'T CHANGE THE ENVIRONMENT!
       exec gsi ...

Unfortunately, Marc, that won't work. It ought to, but it doesn't.

The Unix sharp-bang interpreter escape in the exec(2) system call is *not*
recursive. That is, if you try to exec(2) the file foo with command-line args
of ("foo", "-x") and foo's first few bytes are

      #!/usr/bin/bar -y
      ...

this will turn into an exec of /usr/bin/bar, with command-line args of

     ("/usr/bin/bar" "-y" "foo" "-x")

At this point, however, file /usr/bin/bar better be a "real" Unix binary. If
it, itself, is a file whose first 16 bits are "#!", the exec() call will lose,
usually with a rather misleading error msg.

What this means is that "scheme-script" *cannot* itself be a #! script,
e.g., a /bin/sh shell script. OK?

Scsh deals with this by having /usr/local/bin/scsh be a tiny little trampoline
program -- native-code executable -- that inserts a few items in front
of the argv[] values and execs the S48 vm. That allows you to do scripts
of the form
    #!/usr/local/bin/scsh -s
    !#
    ...
Had /usr/local/bin/scsh itself been a vm heap image as a script, i.e. a file
of the form
    #!/usr/local/lib/scsh/scheme48vm -i
    ...vm image bits here...
then you would lose.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Point two: 28 is a small number
---------------------------------
While I'm at it, let me remind y'all of another losing feature of Unix'
lame kernel support for #!.

You usually only get 32 chars on that first sharp-bang line, divvied up
between the sharp, the bang, the interpreter filename and the (optional,
single) argument. (Linux gives you 127, but 32 is *very* common on other
systems. I believe Posix only promises you 32, to boot, but i can't swear
to it, since my Posix spec has gone missing.)

Now, remember that you want to put an absolute path name for the
interpreter, since you get no path-search help from the true kernel exec().
Let's do the accounting: 2 chars for sharp & bang. 1 char for the space
separating the interpreter from the argument. N chars for the argument
itself. That leaves 29-N chars for the interpreter, so even if you make the
argument as short as possible -- 1 char -- you still max out at 28 chars for
the interpreter.

Let's see:
    /usr/local/bin/scm-ieee-1178-90
That's 31 characters. Oops.

Now you know why I made scsh's meta-switch a single char. Horrible, isn't it?

My advice: make these program names *short* and highly coded, because the
binaries may live in various directories, and you'd like to allow as much
winnage as possible.
    -Olin