From:	"Tim Van Holder" <tim DOT van DOT holder AT pandora DOT be>
To:	"DJGPP Workers Mailing List" <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject:	.sh etc. as executable extensions
Date:	Sun, 7 Jan 2001 01:01:01 +0100
Message-ID:	<NEBBIOJNGMKPNOBKHCGHOEGECAAA.tim.van.holder@pandora.be>
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Reply-To:	djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com

I noticed the change to wc204.txi made by Eli, explaining why
.sh and friends were no longer being searched for in
__dosexec_find_on_path.
Now I agree there was a problem, especially when building a
GNU package (autoconf, for example) that builds scripts (as
their templates would usually have the .sh extension, causing
bash to mistakenly run them).
However, simply dropping support altogether is annoying. I
use 4DOS as my main DOS prompt. It allows defining 'executable
extensions': if there is an environment variable '.pl', then
you can files with a .pl extension will be run using the
contents of the variable. So I have .sh=bash and .pl='perl -w',
which allows me to easily run autoconf, automake, etc from
outside of bash.
A similar situtation exists on Windows (might be just NT), where
extensions can be made "runnable" from the command line (the
ActiveState distribution does this for perl).
Now, because of the change to the DJGPP library, those will no
longer be available (unless I also keep an extensions-less
version in the path, which is a maintenance nightmare). So
I would suggest there to be some way to re-enable these
alternative executable extensions in some way (maybe an
environment variable specifying what extension DJGPP should
accept? or maybe DJGPP could support 4DOS' executable
extensions?).
I could always build my own libc with those extensions
re-enabled (as I did with bash 2.04, which included a similar
change), but I would expect there are others who would benefit
from this.

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