On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Timothy Madden<terminato...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello > > Sorry if this has been discussed before, my search did not find it. > My questions is if I should use > #!/usr/bin/env python > as the shebang line in a portable and open python script and if it does help > with portability and usage. > > First, can one not find /usr/bin/python in any standard system, at least as > much as /usr/bin/env can be found ? > Not necessarily. The system python (if it exists) is usually in /usr/bin but what if there is no system-installed Python or the user would prefer to use a version they compiled themselves and is therefore in /usr/local/bin? Or what if the system decides /usr/bin is just for the default system tools and everything else should be installed in /opt/? env will always be in the same place, but Python may not be so using env makes it more portable.
> Then, supposing /usr/bin/env is better than /usr/bin/python and I use it, is > it not the case that many editors and code analysing programs, that want to > know the script language for syntax highlighting, code completion, tags and > source code browsing, etc, will loose their functionality because of this > shebang line ? Is this not a good general reason to use the old one ? > > Now I know env is POSIX standard utility, and python is not, and maybe that > could be reason enough, but are there any other issues involved with using > /usr/bin/env ? > > Thank you > Timothy Madden > -- > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
