newbie q: /usr/bin/env why?

[Erik Max Francis]

Matthew Dixon Cowles wrote:

> Putting /usr/bin/env in the #! line will
> start the Python interpreter as long as the interpreter is somewhere
> in the user's PATH. For interactive use, that's a reasonable
> assumption. But in some cases, such as CGI scripts and scripts run
> from cron, the "user" generally has a very minimal environment set up
> and the Python interpreter may not be in a directory that's listed in
> the PATH environment variable. In those circumstances, it's better in
> my opinion to hard-code the interpreter's location than to fiddle the
> PATH variable.

Indeed.  The other case in which you'd probably be better off hardcoding
the path to the interpreter is when you want to avoid as much overhead
as possible; excuting env and then executing python will take longer
than just executing python.  But that is a pretty negligible overhead
compared to that of starting up the interpreter itself.  Still, since
we're nitpicking ...

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