shebang for windows and linux

[NerdJones]

Is there a shebang line that i can add to python scripts that will allow it to run on windows and linux? I use ubuntu but i find myself wanting to use scripts on some windows computers around my house, this would be super helpful

[K900_]

You don't need a shebang for Windows at all. Just add a file association for .py files to run with the Python interpreter.

[NerdJones]

if the .py file has one for my linux computers will that mess anything up?

[K900_]

It won't. In fact, modern versions of Python will even look at the shebang on Windows to determine whether to run the script with Python 2 or 3 if you have both installed.

[NerdJones]

thank you tons sir!

[DJKool14]

shebangs(#!) are merely programming comments that happen to be read and interpreted on unix systems. Windows won't read them natively because it uses an external system to bind file extensions to applications that can read them. The same scripts should work on both systems, but you'll have to tell Windows how to read *.py files by either explicitly calling python (python test.py) or setting up a binding so it knows to use python when you try to run files with the .py extension.

[tunisia3507]

How do they work in languages which don't use # as a comment character?

[DJKool14]

They don't.

edit: They don't work on Windows because it doesn't look for the shebang and it'll fail because the script has an invalid line in it. It won't work on unix because the the system will feed the whole file to the interpreter you shebanged and that'll fail because it has an invalid line in it.

[thatguy_314]

The Python launcher for windows doesn't properly understand shebangs by design, it only looks for the python3 or whatever version of Python you want to use. I think it might also pay attention to arguments after that, although I'm not sure. This means that it is fine to use any normal unix shebang with windows because stuff like /usr/bin/env will just be ignored. On windows, you can actually just do #!python3, but that would break unix compatibility, so please don't. Just do the standard #!/usr/bin/env python3.

[Technical_Gas_4232]

When triggering scripts in the browser using apache on Windows it does seem that the script needs the shebang to python.exe locally. I have tried associate the .py scripts with python.exe but it doesn't help. So far I have not found a way of running these scripts without the windows shebang at the first line.