Mastering Bash

Time for the interpreter: the sha-bang

When the game gets tougher, a few concatenations on the command line cannot be enough to perform the tasks we are meant to accomplish. Too many bits on single lines are too messy, and we lack clarity, so better to store our commands or builtins in a file and have it executed.

When a script is executed, the system loader parses the first line looking for what is named the sha-bang or shebang, a sequence of characters.

#!  

This will force the loader to treat the following characters as a path to the interpreter and its optional arguments to be used to further parse the script, which will then be passed as another argument to the interpreter itself. So, at the end, the interpreter will parse the script ...