Looking at this further, the standards change doesn't even match what Cosmopolitan is doing. From the 'changed their rules' link, the 'Desired Action' is to ad

Looking at this further, the standards change doesn't even match what Cosmopolitan is doing. From the 'changed their rules' link, the 'Desired Action' is to add this text: "The input file may be of any type, but the initial portion of the file intended to be parsed according to the shell grammar [..] shall not contain the NUL character." This handles things like shar archives where you have a shell script at the beginning, then an exit command, then binary gunk. But Cosmopolitan binaries are not just shell scripts with binary. They're hybrids of shell script and DOS executable. And apparently this requires putting nul bytes right near the beginning (see my other comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41640331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41640331), in the "portion [..] intended to be parsed according to the shell grammar". Which explicitly violates the new text. I can understand why this hack is needed for what Cosmopolitan is trying to accomplish, but it makes no sense to claim POSIX blessed it.