[Mono-devel-list] Re: [Mono-list] kernel support

[Simon Kitching]

On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 16:08, George Farris wrote:
> Does anyone know what the plans are for kernel support of mono
> binaries?  Right now a binary mono file shows as:
> 
> MS Windows PE 32-bit Intel 80386 console executable

What command displays this??

> 
> This of course, is totally unacceptable on a Linux machine.  I want to
> be able to run my binaries directly instead of through a shell script.

Well, for executable file which starts with the byte sequence
corresponding to "#!", the application loader will extract the following
characters up to the next linefeed, and start that application passing
the "executed" filename as a parameter.

This is most familiar from shell scripts, perl, etc., but it works for
any "interpreter" and mono is an interpreter...

So if
(a)
the mono compiler inserts:
  #!mono\n
at the start of each binary, and
(b)
the mono runtime skips over these bytes when they occur at the start of
an executable

then it should be possible to start mono executables as if they were
"native".

I'm a real newbie to mono, so I don't know if this functionality already
exists...

Cheers,

Simon