How to fix shebang flags that are not recognized on some systems

For some reason, the -O (optimized) flag is not recognized in the shebang line on a Red Hat Enterprise Server (release 5.3) that I access. On other systems, the flag is recognized without any issue.

Executing the script below on OS X works fine. Recognition of the -O flag can be verified because it enables (when absent) or disables (when given) anything under the if __debug__ conditional:

#!/usr/bin/env python -O                                                                                                                                                                       

if __name__ == '__main__':

    if __debug__:
        print 'lots of debugging output on'

    print 'Fin'

Executing the same script on the RHE system result in:

/usr/bin/env: python -O: No such file or directory

Without the -O flag, the script executes normally on the RHE system (i.e., the __debug__ built-in variable will be set to True).

Is there a cross-platform way to fix this issue? Is there even a platform-specific way to fix the issue of flags on the shebang line to the python interpreter?

Edit: Any other workarounds to setting the __debug__ variable (without using shebang flags) interpreter-wide would also be interesting.

Solution

How about making a small shell script:

pythono:

#!/bin/sh    
/usr/bin/env python -O "$@"

Then change your script to use:

#!pythono

Also note that setting the environment variable PYTHONOPTIMIZE to a non-empty string is the same as using the -O flag. From the man python man page:

   PYTHONOPTIMIZE
          If this is set to a non-empty string it is equivalent to  specifying  the
          -O option. If set to an integer, it is equivalent to specifying -O multi‐
          ple times.