> I guess I can understand why bash works this way.. it means that it can handle arbitrarily long scripts without having to read the entire script into memory a

> I guess I can understand why bash works this way.. it means that it can handle arbitrarily long scripts without having to read the entire script into memory at once. The normal way of reading a file (using a buffer) solves this. The only reason for doing this dance instead would be that it's considered part of the interface. I was going to look for it in the POSIX standard, but it looks like that would cost me $894.00, and that's $7 more than my entire verifying-comments-on-the-internet budget for this fortnight.