3.3 How to turn your text into a program

You don't always have to use the command avatarsay for viewing your texts. You can turn your text itself into a “program”. How that works depends on your system.

On a POSIX compatible system, such as the GNU system you can put a special line at the beginning of your file. The line looks like this: ‘#! /usr/local/avatarsay’. Of course you have to make sure that you use the correct pathname. This has to be the very first line. You can put one or more empty lines after this line — they are ignored. Then you have to set the executable bit of your text file. That goes like this: ‘chmod +x mytext’. Then your text is executable. It accepts almost all the options that avatarsay accepts.

On systems like Windows or ReactOS this line doesn't work — but it doesn't harm either. On those systems you have to use a different trick. You could rename your file such, that it has a special extension; for example .avt. Now you have to configure your system, that the file extension .avt gets associated with the program avatarsay.exe. Then you can double-click on your “text” and it is executed.