At 05:40 PM 3/4/2008 +0300, Oleg Broytmann wrote:
On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 12:14:04AM +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
As a more helpful answer, the ZIP spec allows additional data to be included in the file before the ZIP header. A more common way of using this is to add a zip file on to the end of an ELF executable while still using normal zipfile utilities to read the data in the zip file section and ignore the executable part.
It turns out you can actually use the same trick to prepend a shebang line like "/usr/bin/env python" and a newline character
That's what I thought, too.
- the whole zip
file is still a binary file, but that doesn't prevent the shell from reading that first line of text and handing the file over to Python for execution.
Unix doesn't distinguish text and binary files. (-:
The fact that this actually works was also news to me when the issue I linked in my previous post was first brought to my attention :)
So it really works? Amazing!
Setuptools has been distributed this way for some time:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools#cygwin-mac-os-x-linux-other
It actually contains an entire shell script prefix that launches Python and invokes an entry point inside the egg. With the new interpreter capability, this would've been a *lot* simpler to implement.