long-shebang

A tool for #! scripts with more than one argument.

On most modern systems, the kernel will only pass one argument to a shebang interpreter script. Some tools, like perl and ruby, work around this by parsing the shebang line themselves. long-shebang is a more general solution: it will parse the second line as a shebang line, with arbitrary numbers of arguments. As an additional convenience, the program to be run can be looked up in PATH.

Usage

#!/usr/bin/env long-shebang
#!sh -e
false
true

will fail with exit code 1

Escapes

The following escapes are recognized in the second #! line:

• \\: A literal \
• \n: A newline
• \ (backslash-space): A space rather than an argument delimiter
• \a: If this is the first argument on the second #! line, don't treat the program name as argv[0]. For example, a script with #!\a sh bash -e will be equivalent to execvp("sh", {"bash", "-e", script, NULL}) rather than execvp("sh", {"sh", "bash", "-e", script, NULL}).