shebang - what's the point?

[Todd Burch]

I've written a few hundred scripts now, and not once have I ever coded a
shebang line. I'm writing on both Windows and the Mac (Tiger).

Any time I'm kicking off a script from the Command Prompt or in Terminal
on the Mac, I simply type

ruby <name>.rb

and it works just fine.

So, when it comes down to it, what's the point of the shebang line?

Todd

 

[Enrique Comba Riepenhausen]

I've written a few hundred scripts now, and not once have I ever
coded a
shebang line. I'm writing on both Windows and the Mac (Tiger).

Any time I'm kicking off a script from the Command Prompt or in
Terminal
on the Mac, I simply type

ruby <name>.rb

and it works just fine.

So, when it comes down to it, what's the point of the shebang line?

Todd

Basically so that instead of

ruby <name>.rb

you can write

/<name>.rb

in the shell prompt.

Will only work in *NIX environments though (UNIX, LINUX, BSD, OS X,
Cygwin, etc.)

Cheers,

Enrique Comba Riepenhausen