What is the meaning of !# (bang-pound) in a sh / Bash shell script?

Question

I want to understand how this Scala script works:

#!/usr/bin/env bash exec scala "$0" "$@" !# object HelloWorld { def main(args: Array[String]) { println("Hello, world! " + args.toList) } } HelloWorld main args

On line 3, what is "!#" doing? Is the remainder of the file then fed to standard input of the Scala program? Also, is '!#' documented anywhere?

NB: The nearest thing I could find, although it is not directly relevant in any way is Stack Overflow question Why do you need to put #!/bin/bash at the beginning of a script file? (about the beginning of a Bash script).

Windows version of this question: stackoverflow.com/questions/6671913/… — Luigi Plinge
– Luigi Plinge, Commented Apr 8, 2012 at 22:58

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-26 17:01:06Z

20

From the original documentation:

Script files may have an optional header that is ignored if present. There are two ways to format the header: either beginning with #! and ending with !#, or beginning with ::#! and ending with ::!#.

So the following code is just a header for a Scala script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash exec scala "$0" "$@" !#

edited Jun 26, 2013 at 17:01

Peter Mortensen

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answered Apr 8, 2012 at 4:48

BluesRockAddict

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3 Comments

Jay Taylor Over a year ago

Nice. Then what happens with the script contents following the "!#"?

cHao Over a year ago

Scala runs it. The exec builtin causes the scala interpreter to replace the shell, so bash never sees the !# line. And scala will ignore everything between and including the #! and !#.

Jay Taylor Over a year ago

I thought that was how it might have worked, but I couldn't find the docs for it anywhere. Thank you!

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:34:24Z

When I removed !# in the sample program in BluesRockAddict's answer, I get the following error at the console:

error: script file does not close its header with !# or ::!# one error found

From the above error message, I understood the following things:

!# is the close tag for the header exec scala "$0" "$@", which probably tells Scala that whatever comes after !# is the Scala code to be executed.
!# can be replaced with ::!#.

philwalk · Accepted Answer · 2018-03-22 17:18:31Z

Based purely on experimentation (I assume this is described somewhere):

Beginning with Scala 2.10.0, the non-standard (from a POSIX scripting POV) pound-bang (!#) is no longer required in a POSIX shell environment. The following single line works (but must be the first line of the script, with no leading spaces):

#!/usr/bin/env scala

However, the only way to provide a shebang in a windows batch file is to trick it into calling Scala with itself as the first argument. Consequently, Scala needs to know where the last line of the batch file is, and therefore requires the closing ::!# line. Here's a working example:

::#! call scala %0 %* goto :eof ::!#

Correction: I originally had #!/usr/bin/env scalav (notice the trailing v), which is my script to define property "scala.script", add some libraries to the classpath, before 'exec scala' itself. That way it's possible to determine the name of the script that is being executed, although scalav must then be in your PATH.

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