Question

I have a string with the contents of the first line in a script, eg

#!/bin/bash

but it can be anything such as

#!/path/to/another/interpret -some args -another arg

How can I extract the name of the interpreter – “bash”, “interpret” by omitting path and arguments?

I though about finding the first whitespace to separate args from the path.

Can you help?

Answer 1

I don’t think you can use white spaces in shebang. If you cannot, you can find the interpreter name like this:

interpreter=`cat test.sh | head -n 1 | cut -d' ' -f 1`
basename $interpreter

edit:
shorten version:

interpreter=$(basename $(sed '2q;s/^#!//;s/ .*//' test.sh))