Why do you need to put #!/bin/bash at the beginning of a script file?
I have made Bash scripts before and they all ran fine without #!/bin/bash at the beginning.
What's the point of putting it in? Would things be any different?
Also, how do you pronounce #? I know that ! is pronounced as "bang."
How is #! pronounced?
Answer
It's a convention so the *nix shell knows what kind of interpreter to run.
For example, older flavors of ATT defaulted to sh (the Bourne shell), while older versions of BSD defaulted to csh (the C shell).
Even today (where most systems run bash, the "Bourne Again Shell"), scripts can be in bash, python, perl, ruby, PHP, etc, etc. For example, you might see #!/bin/perl or #!/bin/perl5.
PS:
The exclamation mark (!) is affectionately called "bang". The shell comment symbol (#) is sometimes called "hash".
PPS:
Remember - under *nix, associating a suffix with a file type is merely a convention, not a "rule". An executable can be a binary program, any one of a million script types and other things as well. Hence the need for #!/bin/bash.