make importing SHELL

Rahul Dhesi dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP
Sat Oct 1 13:38:07 AEST 1988


In article <7350 at rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> jfh at rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum)
writes:
>$SHELL is useful for programs which support escapes to the user's shell
>and shell commands from within the program.  in those situations the user
>should get the desired shell and #! would not have added in doing the
>right thing.

This information is already available in /etc/passwd and, with the help
of the dbm routines in 4.3BSD, available very quickly.

I'll admit that on rare occasions a user might want to override this
information, and $SHELL might be a way to do this.

But $SHELL seems to be the only automatic mechanism under System V to
allow the user to specify which shell should be used to interpret a
script.  Therefore my original claim, that $SHELL is a poor
substitute for #!, is relevant.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi



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