[Melbourne-pm] The magic of shebang (was Re: programming tutorials: Perl)

[Alec Clews]

On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 16:48 +1100, john thornton wrote:

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> Thanks very much for that. I went to the site and downloaded the perl
> training book. Perldocs...so many.
> 
> The only part that confuses me is that if
> 
> # is a comment
> 
> then why does the shebang line have any influence:
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> 
> or as a variant to show warnings for code
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> 
> I am using to using # to "comment out" configuration files in Linux
> for setting up mysql and so on.


the shebang notation (#!) is specific to UNIX (and hence Linux)

The #! is actually interpreted by the kernel and tells it which
interpreter to use (in this case Perl)

Perl ignores the line[1]

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_(Unix)


[1] That was a lie. As a special case Perl will look at the line and use
any flags it sees. e.g.

#!/bin/env perl -p

will switch on the pseudo sed mode


-- 
Alec Clews
Personal <alec.clews at gmail.com>                  Melbourne, Australia.
Jabber:  alecclews at jabber.org.au           PGPKey ID: 0x9BBBFC7C
Blog  http://alecthegeek.wordpress.com/
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