Why is the ‘-S’ argument to ‘env’ needed? Based on the man page it doesn’t appear to be doing anything useful here, and in practice it doesn’t either.
The man page tells me:
-S, --split-string=S
process and split S into separate arguments; used to pass multi‐
ple arguments on shebang lines
-S causes the string to be split on spaces and so the arguments are passed correctly.
So in fact "-S" is not passed as a separate argument, but as a prefix in the first (and only) argument, and env then extracts it and acts accordingly:
``` $ /usr/bin/env "-S echo deadbeef" deadbeef ```