🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug28.180137.22861@ra.msstate.edu>, fwp@CC.MsState.Edu (Frank Peters) writes:
|> In article <1992Aug28.155801.14501@sei.cmu.edu> kochmar@sei.cmu.edu (John Kochmar) says:
|> : 
|> : OK, I'll bite: why is it that it is much easier if perl is in an agreed
|> : upon place like /usr/bin?
|> 
|> Because perl is a scripting language.  That means it wants to have a #!
|> line at the beginning with the path name to an executable.  Distributing
|> code in this situation can be an annoyance unless you can arrange to
|> have the path to perl be the same on different systems.

You've gotta be kidding, right?  You're not advocating that perl be
placed in /usr/bin so that scripts you pick up from who-knows-where
will run without modification, right?

I got the same response from someone else in private mail.  Since I
don't make a habit of picking up a script and running it without
checking it over, I don't see changing the #! at the beginning to be
that big a deal.

|> : We use /usr/local for all tools that aren't part of the standard
|> : distribution that the vendor sends us, and I've made all sorts of
|> : software work cleanly while living in /usr/local (and, in almost all
|> : cases, without the use of symbolic links in /usr/bin.)  This model
|> : works really well for us, and most tools will work with this model
|> : if the programmers weren't of the lazy sort who like to hardwire
|> : paths into the binary.
|> 
|> But scripts have a path hardwired into them almost by definition.

True, but the good ones are easily modifiable.  Not that I'm all that
paranoid about stuff I pick up off the net being malicious, but I do
look over the stuff I pick up, and I expect to have to make some site
specific modifications.  #!/mumble/perl if one of those modifications.

John



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John Kochmar		 | Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human
kochmar@sei.cmu.edu	 | brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250
SEI Computing Facilities |			-Harper's Index, October 1989