After getting a lot of feedback from a lot of people about on last post I decided this is too important an issue to let be. I am now convinced more than ever that the inability to run downloaded programs is the result of stubborness (very common in open source communities), and I have to do what I am able to fix it.

I got a couple of good ideas from the feedback – one especially important: the esh program should display a warning before executing the shell script. So I made a prototype implementation, here’s a screenshot:

Also I realised that it makes no sense to have a new file extension (.esh) because many file managers determine the file type using the file’s mime type and not the extension, and since there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work with all shell scripts that’s fine.

I associated shell scripts with the esh program I wrote, and what you see in the screenshot is the dialog that came up after I double-clicked on testshellprogram.sh (which doesn’t have execute permissions).

It does, of course, execute the file if I press ‘I trust this program’.

I started a webpage for the project, to keep all my best ideas on there.