Why do you assume that "people never write relative paths into
'#!' lines"? I just tried it, and it works quite well; perhaps
there is someone somewhere who depends on it. I suggest having
a special prefix, such as "#!?perl", to tell your code to look
up perl in the list.
Well, I've never seen nor heard of anyone writing relative paths.
But I do like the idea of having a special prefix character. What
characters do you think would be good? Of course, there are no
characters which are invalid for pathname (other than NUL), so we
still can't avoid messing up something that someone might be doing
somewhere.
Dale
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