Shebang
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Revision as of 20:44, 17 May 2016
A shebang (also called a hashbang, and other equally silly names) is line of text that associates a file (usually a script to be interpreted) with an application. The technique is crude but effective, and is ubiquitous on Unix-like systems.
Format details
If one attempts to execute a file whose contents begin with "#!", a Unix-like operating system looks for the name of a program after the "#!", and executes that program instead, with the original file as a parameter. This effectively makes the original file itself executable.
An example of a shebang is
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
