[jolmg]

> Although this is probably the easiest way to implement '#!' inside the kernel, I'm a little bit surprised that it survived in Linux (in a completely independent implementation) and in OpenBSD (where the security people might have had a double-take at some point). But given Hyrum's Law there are probably people out there who are depending on this behavior so we're now stuck with it.

I don't see what there would be to gain in disallowing the program path on the shebang line to be relative. The person that wrote the shebang can also write relative paths in some other part of the file.

[saurik]

Or, like, if you aren't reading and caring about what the interpreter is--as that's the only time this can burn you: it isn't doing a PATH lookup, so you can't walk into this one on accident--then it could literally be something like /bin/rm on some key file. This entire article is based on an assumption that this is somehow so obviously bad that there doesn't even need to be an explanation or defense of any kind of that idea.

[jolmg]

> This entire article is based on an assumption that this is somehow so obviously bad that there doesn't even need to be an explanation or defense of any kind of that idea.

I'm not reading it like that. The tone is just one of surprise, since this isn't something that one typically sees. Since it's obscure, it leads one to wonder if it can be bad, and I don't see how it could be.

I think it survived in the independent Linux because it's the simple and obvious way to do things, and it doesn't lead to any exceptional power of misuse one didn't already have with writing the rest of the file.

[saurik]

Right: I agree with you. I'm saying the article is making an unfounded assumption and am providing more reasoning for why you are correct.