I.1 Overview of the mechanism

The common way of running a Scheme script, is to invoke the executable vicare using the option --r6rs-script to select the pathname of the file:

vicare --r6rs-script path/to/script.sps

to run a compiled Scheme program, we invoke the executable vicare using the option --binary-program to select the pathname of the file:

vicare --binary-program path/to/program

The features implemented in the binfmt_misc kernel module allow us to invoke almost every program by simply typing its name in the shell, without explicitly invoking the executable program implementing the interpreter; this includes for example compiled Java, Python or Emacs programs, and of course Scheme programs; this mechanism is a generalisation of the mechanism that runs shell scripts whose file begins with #!/bin/sh.

With proper configuration: the kernel recognises the binary file type by matching some bytes at the beginning of the file with a magic byte sequence (masking out specified bits) we have supplied; it can also recognise a filename extension.

If we enable Vicare support for binfmt_misc, we can run Scheme programs as follows:

• For source scripts, we make the file executable and put as very first bytes the string ;;;!vicare, then we just do:

  path/to/script.sps
  

• For compiled programs, we make the file executable and just do:

  path/to/program