What is the preferred Bash shebang?

Question

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 1

I recommend using:

#!/bin/bash 

It's not 100% portable (some systems place bash in a location other than /bin), but the fact that a lot of existing scripts use #!/bin/bash pressures various operating systems to make /bin/bash at least a symlink to the main location.

The alternative of:

#!/usr/bin/env bash 

has been suggested -- but there's no guarantee that the env command is in /usr/bin (and I've used systems where it isn't). Furthermore, this form will use the first instance of bash in the current users $PATH, which might not be a suitable version of the bash shell.

(But /usr/bin/env should work on any reasonably modern system, either because env is in /usr/bin or because the system does something to make it work. The system I referred to above was SunOS 4, which I probably haven't used in about 25 years.)

If you need a script to run on a system that doesn't have /bin/bash, you can modify the script to point to the correct location (that's admittedly inconvenient).

I've discussed the tradeoffs in greater depth in my answer to this question.

A somewhat obscure update: One system I use, Termux, a desktop-Linux-like layer that runs under Android, doesn't have /bin/bash (bash is /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/bash) -- but it has special handling to support #!/bin/bash.

Answer 2

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.