Shebang

What is a Shebang?

A shebang, short for shell-bang, is a statement written in the first line of a script file starting with #! that tells an operating system's shell which program to use to execute the script file. This mainly applies to UNIX-inspired systems like Linux, BSD, and macOS. It isn't commonly used in Windows.

For example, if you have a file called script.sh (a shell script) that starts with #!/bin/sh, it means that the program found at the filepath /bin/sh should be used to run the script. Meanwhile, if it started with #1/bin/bash, it would use Bash to execute the file.

Note: on Windows, program files typically end in the file extension .exe. This isn't the case on Linux. When we say /bin/sh, we mean there is a file called just sh that is an actual program, not sh.exe.

Quotes

Perl is invoked from the command line as described in perl. Most perl scripts, however, do have a first line such as "#!/usr/local/bin/perl". This is known as a shebang (shell-bang) statement and tells the OS shell where to find the perl interpreter.

Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl, "revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7" [https://perldoc.perl.org/perlplan9] (accessed 2024-10-03)