[Bioperl-l] standardize shebang line in bioperl scripts

[Fields, Christopher J]

We generally have two sets of users:

1) Ones using the scripts installed from CPAN
2) Developers who may use the scripts directly

In case #1 I could see the benefits of using the perl version used for installation, as the dependencies should also be installed as well.  Alternatively, in case #2 it makes sense to default to ‘/usr/bin/env’ to cover as many cases as we can.  Case #1 is already set up.

chris

On September 11, 2018 at 2:15:35 PM, Steven Lembark (lembark at wrkhors.com<mailto:lembark at wrkhors.com>) wrote:

On Wed, 29 Aug 2018 12:19:54 +0100
Carnë Draug <carandraug+dev at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> I was wondering if there's any consensus about what should be used in
> the shebang line. Looking at the existing scripts, I found:
>
> #!perl
> #!/usr/bin/env perl
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
>

POSIX did away with non-absolute path #! lines.

#!/usr/bin/perl is largely unusable as it assumes you are using the
O/S installed versin of perl, which you usually aren't (unless you
want to use 5.8 on Centos or 5.10 on Redhat or 5.16 on Amazon linux).

Net result: "env" is the only sane way to go.

Luvly thing is that env might be installed in /bin/env or /usr/bin/env
depending on Linux vs. BSD vs. SysV roots of whatever you are running
Perl on (let alone Windows...).

The one most likely to work is:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

linux habitually installs env into /bin with a symlink in /usr/bin;
BSD & SysV install it in /usr/bin maybe-without a symlink in /bin.

I any case using "/usr/bin/perl" either ties you to decade(s) out of
date perl with the O/S distro or forces you to update the disro perl,
which may break ancient pieces of the distro itself.


--
Steven Lembark 3920 10th Ave South
Workhorse Computing Birmingham, AL 35222
lembark at wrkhors.com +1 888 359 3508

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