Kieran Hunt

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -Eeuxo pipefail

# ...

#!/usr/bin/env bash

This is the interpreter directive (or shebang). Older Bash shebangs used to look something like #!/bin/bash. But the bash executable might not be in /bin on all systems. Portability isn’t guarenteed.

env (archive) will search through the current $PATH for the interpreter. It should be able to find bash even if it is somewhere other than /bin.

The drawbacks of using this approach seem to be:

• It’s hard to pass additional parameters to the intepreter. Not all versions of env seem to support the -S argument needed for this. I can’t recall having to do this for Bash, but have run into issues with ts-node (archive) before.
• Just like bash may not be in /bin, env may not be in /usr/bin. I’ve never run into this in the wild though.

set -Eeuxo pipefail

• E - The e command disables the ERR trap and -E re-enables it.
• e - Stop executing the script when a command fails. Vital.
• u - Error when trying to access unset variables.
• x - Print each command before executing it, including expanding the value of arguments.
• o pipefail - Bash won’t propogate non-zero exit codes to the end of a pipeline. This turns that on.

For more, see Safer bash scripts with ‘set -euxo pipefail’ · vaneyckt.io (archive).