ls says in green what the shell will start

Directories were already blue. Something the shell will run is green now,
and it is asked by LOOKING rather than looked up.

This was priced once as needing a runnable bit in the directory entry,
set by the filesystem from a list of magic numbers it would have to be
taught - declined twice, for putting format knowledge in the filesystem
and giving two implementations a registry to keep in step.

It costs nothing of the sort any more. The shell decides what to run by
reading a file's first block, so "will this run" is a question with an
answer already, and this asks the same one the shell would: SBEX for a
program, "#!" for a script. Nothing is written down and nothing has to
agree about anything.

The price is a block read per file, which is exactly what the bit existed
to avoid: a listing of thirty seven files went from 260,593 cycles to
635,321. It is paid in ls and not in dir on purpose - dir is the listing
you audit and is built into the shell, this is the one you read and was
loaded off the disk anyway. The fast one stays fast.

plain.script is the proof on the test disk: it sits among a dozen scripts
that are green and is not one, because it is the fixture with no shebang
and the shell will not start it. The extension is decoration and the
colour is the truth, which is the whole of what running by content means,
finally visible.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW

This commit is contained in:

Anachronaut

2026-09-06 19:53:33 -04:00

co-authored by

Claude Opus 5

parent afda6ca83b

commit eaeb473176

15 changed files with 124 additions and 23 deletions

Tests/expected/cosmosMonitorRun.out

+1 -1

View File

@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@ args.script             64
 pass.script             20
 holds.script            87
 files, 2 directories
 of 64 entries, 1890 blocks free
 of 64 entries, 1889 blocks free
 > exit
 halted
 Execution halted.