python - Shebang executable not found because of UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark)

Question

For some reason the shebang in one of my scripts does not work:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print "Hello World"

When I execute this file, I get an error

 % ./test.py
./test.py: 1: #!/usr/bin/env: not found

There is no problem with the content of my /usr/bin/ directory: both env and python are there, with correct execution rights.

Answer 1

This is due to how Unix and Linux handle the shebang. #! must be the first two bytes in the file. If you have a BOM then this isn't true anymore hence the error.

Note that putting a BOM is completely useless from the point of view of the python interpreter, since the # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- already tells python the encoding.

AFAIK BOM is usually not used with utf-8. It is used for UTF-16 et similia in order to specify the byte-order. If the editor assumes the wrong encoding you should be able to explicitly open the file with the correct encoding.