shebangs calling octave.app (was: line endings)

[Rob Mahurin]

On May 14, 2009, at 1:23 PM, William Miner wrote:
> Part of the solution, as several people have suggested is to add  
> the full
> path to the octave executable. Having said that, It still doesn’t  
> work.
>
> I'm using BBedit which allow me to change the line endings.
>
> For Unix which is a line feed I get
> dsl017-068-210:Octave williamminer$ ./hello
> ./hello: line 3: syntax error near unexpected token `"Hello, world! 
> \n"'
> ./hello: line 3: `printf("Hello, world!\n");'

This is the right sort of line ending.  The error looks like your  
script is still being sent to the shell, instead of to octave.

> And finally for windows which is carriage return line feed I get
> dsl017-068-210:Octave williamminer$ ./hello
> -bash: ./hello: /Applications/Octave.app/Contents/Resources/bin/ 
> octave^M:
> bad interpreter: No such file or directory
> dsl017-068-210:Octave williamminer$

Aha: that file in the Octave.app package is a shell script which sets  
some environment.  Apparently shell scripts can't be shebang  
interpreters (which makes sense, thinking about how the kernel turns  
a shebang into an exec()).

If you set up your environment as in that script, you should be able  
to call Octave.app/.../octave-3.0.5 (or whichever version) as your  
interpreter.  The usual way to do this is to clutter your shell  
startup scripts with variable definitions, which is an ugly kludge.

Cheers,
Rob

--
Rob Mahurin
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Tennessee                 865 207 2594
Knoxville, TN 37996                     address@hidden