What is the preferred Bash shebang?

bash shebang
Kurtosis picture Kurtosis · Apr 29, 2012 · Viewed 478.9k times · Source

Is there any Bash shebang objectively better than the others for most uses?

  • #!/usr/bin/env bash
  • #!/bin/bash
  • #!/bin/sh
  • #!/bin/sh -
  • etc

I vaguely recall a long time ago hearing that adding a dash to the end prevents someone passing a command to your script, but can’t find any details on that.

Answer

l0b0 picture l0b0 · Apr 30, 2012

You should use #!/usr/bin/env bash for portability: different *nixes put bash in different places, and using /usr/bin/env is a workaround to run the first bash found on the PATH. And sh is not bash.

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