Posts: Scripts

#! /usr/bin/env considered harmful

Many programming guides recommend to begin scripts with the #! /usr/bin/env shebang in order to to automatically locate the necessary interpreter. For example, for a Python script you would use #! /usr/bin/env python, and then the saying goes, the script would “just work” on any machine with Python installed.

The reason for this recommendation is that /usr/bin/env python will search the PATH for a program called python and execute the first one found… and that usually works fine on one’s own machine.

September 14, 2016 · Tags: featured, portability, programming, scripts, unix
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