From: Paul Jarc (prj@po.cwru.edu)                                              
Subject: Re: Execing perl?                                                     
Newsgroups: gnu.bash.bug                                                       
Date: 2001-07-11 12:35:18 PST                                                  

"Paul D. Smith" <pausmith@nortelnetworks.com> writes:
> My entire goal is to invoke Perl when I don't know the path.  I have
> lots of different systems, with different OS's on them, and Perl is
> installed on different places on each of them.  I want to run the same
> script on all of them.

You don't care where perl is installed.  You care whether a single
path is *a* (not *the*) name of perl, on all systems.  So on each
system, create a /command directory, and put a symlink to perl there.
Then use #!/command/perl in your scripts.  (This won't help for
systems you don't control, but I don't know whether that matters.)
See also: <URL:http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html>
and: <URL:http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html>

> How frustrating!  Other interpreters all have straightforward ways of
> doing this.

Such as?  This problem doesn't depend on the interpreter; a script has
to have *some* absolute path in the #! line.  Using /bin/sh is still
using an absolute path of an interpreter.

> Perl is getting too fancy for its own britches,

I think it passed that point a good long while ago.  Sending mail to
root when invoked for setuid scripts comes to mind.


paul