A surprise with how '#!' handles its program argument in practice

Summary

Every so often I get to be surprised about some Unix thing. Today's surprise is the actual behavior of '#!' in practice on at least Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, which I learned about from a comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on my entry on (not) using '#!/usr/bin/env'. I'll quote the starting part here: In fact the shebang line doesn’t require absolute paths, you can use relative paths too. The path is simply resolved from your current directory, just as any other path would be – the kernel simply doesn’t do anything special for shebang line paths at all. [...] I found this so surprising that I tested it on our Linux servers as well as a FreeBSD and an OpenBSD machine. On the Linux servers (and probably on the others too), the kernel really does accept the full collection of relative paths in '#!'. You can write '#!python3', '#!bin/python3', '#!../python3', '#!../../../usr/bin/python3', and so on, and provided that your current directory is in the right place in the filesystem, they all worked. (On FreeBSD and OpenBSD I only tested the '#!python3' case.) As far as I can tell, this behavior goes all the way back to 4.2 BSD (which isn't quite the origin point of '#!' support in the Unix kernel but is about as close as we can get). The execve() kernel implementation in sys/kern_exec.c finds the program from your '#!' line with a namei() call that uses the same arguments (apart from the name) as it did to find the initial executable, and that initial executable can definitely be a relative path. Although this is probably the easiest way to implement '#!' inside the kernel, I'm a little bit surprised that it survived in Linux (in a completely independent implementation) and in OpenBSD (where the security people might have had a double-take at some point). But given Hyrum's Law there are probably people out there who are depending on this behavior so we're now stuck with it. (In the kernel, you'd have to go at least a little bit out of your way to check that the new path star...