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Linux was made to be free and open.

Linux was made to be free and open. The idea is, an individual working with a piece of software should be allowed to view, edit, and share its source code without legal consequence. The free software Movement was largely the brainchild of Richard Stallman. Having been a member of the academic hacker community for over a decade, he had grown frustrated by the spread of proprietary software and came to see it as a violation of people’s rights to innovate and improve existing software.

In 1983, Stallman launched the GNU Project – an effort to create a complete operating system which would provide its users with the freedom to view, change, and share its source code. According to Stallman, the proprietary software puts an unfair burden on users and developers who would otherwise be able to change the code to suit their own needs or alter it to serve a new function.

Fast forward to 1991, Linus Torvalds while studying computer science at University of Helsinki, began a project that later became the Linux kernel. Linux (also known as GNU/Linux) is a computer operating systems, like Microsoft or Apple Mac OS. Unlike those two, Linux is built with a collaborative development model. The operating system and most of its software are created by volunteers and employees of companies, governments, and organizations from all over the world. To continue this legacy, Linux Administrators and Engineers all over the world must invest in the personal and professional development of Newcomers. We must leverage our networks in order to do so effectively and efficiently. We are always open to new ideas, energy and engineering contributions.

Our goal at ShebangLinux is simple: We aim to create a platform that provides everyone with the connection they need to be successful in their career.

 

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The Shebang (#!)

 

The Shebang (#!)

#!/bin/bash

This is the first line of the script above. The hash exclamation mark ( #! ) character sequence is referred to as the Shebang. Following it is the path to the interpreter (or program) that should be used to run (or interpret) the rest of the lines in the text file. (For Bash scripts it will be the path to Bash, but there are many other types of scripts and they each have their own interpreter.)

Formatting is important here. The shebang must be on the very first line of the file (line 2 won’t do, even if the first line is blank). There must also be no spaces before the # or between the ! and the path to the interpreter.

Whilst you could use a relative path for the interpreter, most of the time you are going to want to use an absolute path. You will probably be running the script from a variety of locations so absolute is the safest (and often shorter than a relative path too in this particular case).

It is possible to leave out the line with the shebang and still run the script but it is unwise. If you are at a terminal and running the Bash shell and you execute a script without a shebang then Bash will assume it is a Bash script. So this will only work assuming the user running the script is running it in a Bash shell and there are a variety of reasons why this may not be the case, which is dangerous.

You can also run Bash, passing the script as an argument.