Opinions/tips - is this AWK shebang a bad idea?

[Zucca]

I wanted to be able to run a awk script "user friendly" way by just giving it +x.
However I noticed that if I used the common shebang of #!/usr/bin/awk -f it fails if switches are being given as arguments - awk itself grabs the switch (and usually doesn't recognize it).
So I had a need to be able to have a shebang like #!/usr/bin/awk -f <script> -- [arguments can start with dash here].
That's not possible on "normal ways" so with little thinking I created this monster:

[Naib]

Have you tried /use/bin/env awk as the shebang? Iirc there were a number of benefits using env over explicit binary referencing
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[Zucca]

[Zucca]

Hmmm... Strange. When using env to run that awk shebang the awk process falls into infinite loop. I also tried with #!/usr/bin/env awk -- <rest of the shebang>, but same result.
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..: Zucca :..
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[Naib]

Ok crud solution *if* the awk arguements could change...
Have the entire thing as a bash script, this consumes the arguements, the awk script is then a docstring within the bash consumer and now $1 can be passed to awk
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[khayyam]

Zucca ...

not sure what you mean by "awk itself grabs the switch (and usually doesn't recognize it)", I can pass '-v' (see below). Anyhow, awk "programs" do not have a shebang, by adding one the interpreter is the shell (which then runs 'awk'), so they must be written in a way the interpreter understands (so, much the same as you might provide it "on the commanline"):

[1clue]

The shebang is supposed to be the path to the app/shell/language interpreter/whatever which is to be used to execute the rest of the script.

The first line (the one with the shebang) is interpreted by your shell (presumably your login shell but that would depend on if another shell is in use within that). I believe you may get different results if your shell is bash or sh or csh or any other value.

There is a well-defined way to pass arguments to these scripts. I'm positive that passing arguments correctly by the correct mechanism is extensively tested and very consistent across shells and interpreters included with a typical distro.

All that aside, I can see no benefit to doing things the way they are being shown here. Because you can? Code obfuscation? An addiction to one-line complex solutions?

[1clue]

On top of that, I think the exit value will possibly be the numeric result of the shebang, not the exit result of the script.

[Naib]

Shebang is interpreted by the kernel iirc


Edit. Yup just reconfirmed, by the kernel and this is why there are limitations on additional arguments AND equally why gentoo devs had to write their own python elf to wrap around a py script shebang to intercept it correctly

As per the kernel docu, they recommend a wrapper as I suggested


If you want to pass special arguments to your interpreter, you can write a wrapper script for it. See Documentation/admin-guide/java.rst for an example.
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[Zucca]

[Zucca]

[Zucca]

I've resolved the exit status issue.

[1clue]

[Zucca]

[R0b0t1]

Did you ever get awk scripts running cleanly with the interpreter line? I'm not sure I understand your post containing the following:

[Zucca]

[Zucca]

It seems gawk has a --exec switch to circumvent the problem.

So...