thanks for the bash links and the explanation on “env” … i’m also a firm believer in superstition, as is our buddy John McCain

I assume the Mac terminal must have some sort of encoding scheme (Isn’t it in the display preferences or something?), but I really don’t know how it works. These guys claim to be on top of it, for whatever that’s worth.

As far as python’s “shebang” goes, you’re right, “env” is the home of all your environment variables, which includes the PATH varible that would show the way to your “python” command and interpreter. Try typing “env” into your bash sometime and you’ll see what I mean. It also looks like Wikipedia has a helpful entry on the topic.

I’m a long way from an expert on this stuff, but I’m sure that on many systems you could happily substitute…

#!/usr/bin/python

… or whatever the direct path is to your python interpreter’s binary file and it would still work fine. In fact, I bet that, depending on how you execute the file…

#!python

…might even work.

Frankly, the only reason I use /usr/bin/env is superstition, it’s the convention I was taught when I started. My guess for why it’s better: I think it would probably still work if my python installation was not at /usr/bin/python, but still somewhere else on the PATH. If you explictly state the location of python, then I suppose it would probably stop working if you moved to a system where it was someplace else. For example, what if you’re running Mac OSX and you install Python or Ruby or whatever using Fink or MacPorts or whatever and it puts it in some weird location.

Tried it twice on new recipe. First, cut-and-pasted formatted text from the blog page, got non-ascii error, halted. Then ran code cut-and-pasted from popup plain text “view code” window, ran great.

When it comes to copying-and-pasting, does Bash (in Terminal) also care if the text is ascii or utf or iso or whatever?

The whole topper thing brings up a novice recurring question for me: why is python’s declaration path:

$ /usr/bin/env python

and not just

$ /usr/bin/

which has the python files. is env some kind of pointer file that every system has, sort of a preferences file?

I put in some time today dressing up little things on the blog’s infrastructure. One thing I tried to do was wrap in the code formatting style you see above. Are the copy and pastes working for you now?