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Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

Using spaces in a shebang is not a standard thing and doesn’t work in most shells.

The spaces are being handled by `env`:

    $ env "-S echo hello world"
    hello world

https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/env-...

Curious for what systems this does not work? I start a lot of my shebangs with `#!/usr/bin/env <app>` such that I can rely on PATH for resolving application locations.

Just plain #!app also works. Probably less portable, but it does work on linux and macOS. Not sure if POSIX has anything to say about shebangs.

Huh, I guess I've never given it too much thought. I was under the impression for some reason that the first argument was supposed to be an absolute path.

It might have had to be absolute on ancient Unixen ... Unices? Seems POSIX has all of this to say about shebangs:

    If the first line of a file of shell commands starts with the characters "#!", the results are unspecified.

So it's basically all down to convention, but one that's been followed long enough that you can rely on it. I still don't count on shebang taking more than one argument to the command though.

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