Shebang
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
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== Links == | == Links == | ||
* [[Wikipedia: Shebang (Unix)]] | * [[Wikipedia: Shebang (Unix)]] | ||
| + | * [https://homepages.cwi.nl/~aeb/std/hashexclam.html #! - the Unix truth as far as I know it.] | ||
[[Category:Executables]] | [[Category:Executables]] | ||
[[Category:Source code]] | [[Category:Source code]] | ||
Revision as of 17:08, 21 November 2017
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
