What is "shebang"

Shebang \She*bang"\, n. [Cf. Shebeen.] A jocosely depreciative name for a dwelling or shop.

1862, "hut, shed, shelter," popularized among soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, but like other Civil War slang (such as skedaddle) of uncertain origin. Perhaps an alteration of shebeen (q.v.), but shebang in the sense "tavern," a seemingly necessary transitional sense, is not attested before 1878 and shebeen seems to have been not much used in the U.S. Bartlett's 1877 edition describes it as "A strange word that had its origin during the late civil war. It is applied alike to a room, a shop, or a hut, a tent, a cabin; an engine house." Phrase the whole shebang first recorded 1869, but relation to the earlier use of the word is obscure. Either or both senses also might be mangled pronunciations of French char-à-banc, a bus-like wagon with many seats. For an older guess:\n\n[Shebang] used even yet by students of Yale College and elsewhere to designate their rooms, or a theatrical or other performance in a public hall, has its origin probably in a corruption of the French cabane, a hut, familiar to the troops that came from Louisiana, and constantly used in the Confederate camp for the simple huts, which they built with such alacrity and skill for their winter quarters. The constant intercourse between the outposts soon made the term familiar to the Federal army also.

["Americanisms: The English of the New World," Maximillian Schele De Vere, New York, Charles Scribner & Co., 1872.]

Etymology 1 alt. 1 (context archaic English) A lean-to or temporary shelter. 2 Any matter of present concern; thing; or business. 3 (context obsolete English) A vehicle.''Take our Word'' n. 1 (context archaic English) A lean-to or temporary shelter. 2 Any matter of present concern; thing; or business. 3 (context obsolete English) A vehicle.''Take our Word'' Etymology 2

n. (context computing English) The character string "#!" used at the beginning of a computer file to indicate which interpreter can process the commands in the file, chiefly used in Unix and related operating systems.

n. an entire system; used in the phrase `the whole shebang'

In computing, a shebang is the character sequence consisting of the characters number sign and exclamation mark at the beginning of a script. It is also called sha-bang, hashbang, pound-bang,hash-pling, or Crunchbang

Under Unix-like operating systems, when a script with a shebang is run as a program, the program loader parses the rest of the script's initial line as an interpreter directive; the specified interpreter program is run instead, passing to it as an argument the path that was initially used when attempting to run the script. For example, if a script is named with the path path/to/script, and it starts with the following line:

#!/bin/sh

then the program loader is instructed to run the program /bin/sh instead, passing path/to/script as the first argument.

The shebang line is usually ignored by the interpreter because the "#" character is a comment marker in many scripting languages; some language interpreters that do not use the hash mark to begin comments (such as Scheme) still may ignore the shebang line in recognition of its purpose. Other solutions rely on a preprocessor, which evaluates and removes the shebang line, before the remainder of the script is forwarded to a compiler or interpreter. For example, this is the case with InstantFPC—a command that allows to run programs written in Free Pascal as scripts under several operating systems.

Shebang may refer to: