On 27/10/2013 23:58, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote:
It is an unfortunate artefact of Unix history that “binary” has an
established connotation of “executable”, encompassing even executable
text files.
That's a lot broader than Unix - people talk about "binaries" meaning
executables in Windows and OS/2 too. Unix is, if anything, _less_
inclined that way - the executable segment is called "text", which
always struck me as a bit odd.
So the separation I'm drawing attention to in the FHS has nothing to do
with whether the files are text files, and everything to do with whether
they're executable programs and code libraries.
Yup. Unix does a fairly good job of blurring the line between
"executables that can be loaded and jumped to" and "scripts that get
loaded by an interpreter". I actually have a few scripts that take
several levels of interpreter, something like:
foo.pike
#!/usr/local/bin/pike
bar.pike:
#!/.../foo.pike --parameter
fum.pike:
#!/.../bar.pike --otherparameter
Unix will happily execute ./fum.pike as "/usr/local/bin/pike
/.../foo.pike --parameter /.../bar.pike --otherparameter ./fum.pike".
There's a limit on the number of interpreters (to prevent loops), but
I haven't hit it :)
There is one important place, though, where scripts are called data
files, and that's licensing. The GPL, for instance, does NOT cover
your scripts, even if it covers the interpreter, because *to the
language interpreter*, your scripts are just data files. But that's
more of a legal distinction than a filesystem hierarchical one.
ChrisA
Quoting from another thread
"What is the difference between "script" code (like Javascript and
visual) made for the screen (where such magic values are utilized) and
compiled source (made for the machine)?"
This obviously impacts on the discussion above, so how does Unix,
Windows and other operating systems distinguish these with respect to
binary, executable, code library or whatever?
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