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Writing an script interpreter in bash


I wrote a bash wrapper to ruby that goes through various setup steps.

The most basic version is,

   #!/bin/bash 
   #   ruby_wrapper.sh
   ruby

Now I want to be able to use this wrapper just like regular ruby! Specifically, I want to create a .rb file that uses this "interpreter".

   #!/path/to/ruby_wrapper.sh
   #  my_file.rb
   puts "hello world"

So I want to be able to do $ ./my_file.rb instead of $ ruby_wrapper.sh my_file.rb

Is this possible?

The documentation claims it isn't.

Note that the interpreter may not itself be an interpreter script.

But I don't see why not. Does anyone have any ideas to get around this?


Solution

  • Try invoking your wrapper with /usr/bin/env. It's actually good practice to execute Ruby scripts with /usr/bin/env ruby as you don't have to hard code the path to the ruby binary, so this is not unnatural.

    $ cat ruby_wrapper.sh 
    #!/bin/bash
    exec ruby "$@"
    
    $ cat wrapped.rb 
    #!/usr/bin/env /tmp/ruby_wrapper.sh
    puts "hello world"
    
    $ ./wrapped.rb 
    hello world
    

    Also as a side note see how I've used exec in the wrapper script. This will allow the ruby interpreter to take over your wrapper script's process rather than run as a child process of your script. This makes the wrapper transparent to the caller (signals will be delivered directly to ruby rather than to bash, for example).