Purpose of #!/usr/bin/python3

Question

I have noticed this in a couple of scripting languages, but in this example, I am using python. In many tutorials, they would start with #!/usr/bin/python3 on t

Answer 1

To clarify how the shebang line works for windows, from the 3.7 Python doc:

• If the first line of a script file starts with #!, it is known as a “shebang” line. Linux and other Unix like operating systems have native support for such lines and they are commonly used on such systems to indicate how a script should be executed.
• The Python Launcher for Windows allows the same facilities to be used with Python scripts on Windows
• To allow shebang lines in Python scripts to be portable between Unix and Windows, the launcher supports a number of ‘virtual’ commands to specify which interpreter to use. The supported virtual commands are:
  • /usr/bin/env python
    • The /usr/bin/env form of shebang line has one further special property. Before looking for installed Python interpreters, this form will search the executable PATH for a Python executable. This corresponds to the behaviour of the Unix env program, which performs a PATH search.
  • /usr/bin/python
  • /usr/local/bin/python
  • python

Answer 2

#!/usr/bin/python3 is a shebang line.

A shebang line defines where the interpreter is located. In this case, the python3 interpreter is located in /usr/bin/python3. A shebang line could also be a bash, ruby, perl or any other scripting languages' interpreter, for example: #!/bin/bash.

Without the shebang line, the operating system does not know it's a python script, even if you set the execution flag on the script and run it like ./script.py. To make the script run by default in python3, either invoke it as python3 script.py or set the shebang line.

You can use #!/usr/bin/env python3 for portability across different systems in case they have the language interpreter installed in different locations.

Answer 3

Actually the determination of what type of file a file is very complicated, so now the operating system can't just know. It can make lots of guesses based on -

• extension
• UTI
• MIME

But the command line doesn't bother with all that, because it runs on a limited backwards compatible layer, from when that fancy nonsense didn't mean anything. If you double click it sure, a modern OS can figure that out- but if you run it from a terminal then no, because the terminal doesn't care about your fancy OS specific file typing APIs.

Regarding the other points. It's a convenience, it's similarly possible to run

python3 path/to/your/script

If your python isn't in the path specified, then it won't work, but we tend to install things to make stuff like this work, not the other way around. It doesn't actually matter if you're under *nix, it's up to your shell whether to consider this line because it's a shellcode. So for example you can run bash under Windows.

You can actually ommit this line entirely, it just mean the caller will have to specify an interpreter. Also don't put your interpreters in nonstandard locations and then try to call scripts without providing an interpreter.

Answer 4

1. And this line is how.

2. It is ignored.

3. It will fail to run, and should be changed to point to the proper location. Or env should be used.

4. It will fail to run, and probably fail to run under a different version regardless.

Answer 5

That's called a hash-bang. If you run the script from the shell, it will inspect the first line to figure out what program should be started to interpret the script.

A non Unix based OS will use its own rules for figuring out how to run the script. Windows for example will use the filename extension and the # will cause the first line to be treated as a comment.

If the path to the Python executable is wrong, then naturally the script will fail. It is easy to create links to the actual executable from whatever location is specified by standard convention.

Answer 6

This line helps find the program executable that will run the script. This shebang notation is fairly standard across most scripting languages (at least as used on grown-up operating systems).

An important aspect of this line is specifying which interpreter will be used. On many development-centered Linux distributions, for example, it is normal to have several versions of python installed at the same time.

Python 2.x and Python 3 are not 100% compatible, so this difference can be very important. So #! /usr/bin/python and #! /usr/bin/python3 are not the same (and neither are quite the same as #! /usr/bin/env python3 as noted elsewhere on this page.