Bug in #! processing - One More Time

[Gordon Tetlow]

Garance A Drosihn wrote:
<snip history>

> As I see it, we have the following choices to fix this:
>
> 1) MFC the January 31st change to kern/imgact_shell.c to 5.3-stable,
>    as it is.  This means we haven't fixed the problem that people
>    complained about in 2002 and again in 2004.  And I still think
>    it is "not appropriate" for the execve() system to be deciding
>    what '#' means on that line.  The biggest advantage is that this
>    means 5.4-release will behave exactly the same as 3.5 through
>    5.3-release have behaved.
>
> 2) Remove '#'-processing from kern/imgact_shell.c, and remove my
>    change to bin/sh/options.c (which doesn't work right once we
>    do that).  This breaks shell-scripts which use the feature as
>    documented by perl (and other scripting languages), and fixes
>    the problem people complained about in 2002/2004.
>
> 3) Change kern/imgact_shell.c to process shebang options the same
>    way other (non-BSD?) operating systems do.  By that I mean:
>    send the entire string as arg[1], and let the scripting
>    language sort it out.  This is an incompatible change from
>    FreeBSD 5.3 to 5.4, but would put make us "more consistent"
>    with other operating systems.
>
> 4) Provide some way for /bin/sh to find out where the shebang
>    options end, and the user-specified options begin.  This could
>    make everyone happy, but it's more work and right now (this
>    close to 5.4-release) that wouldn't make me particularly happy...
>
> Or we could do #1 for now, and plan to do #4 after 5.4-release.
> Or do #1 now in 5.3, and go with some incompatible change (#2
> or #3) only in 6.x-current.

I would say we should stick with #1 for the 5.x release and use #3 for
6.x and further. We have already frozen APIs and ABIs. For people that
might have scripts that use this syntax to have problems between minor
releases is unacceptable.

-gordon
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