What does the line "#!/bin/sh" mean in a UNIX shell script?

I was going through some shell script tutorials and found the following sample program:

#!/bin/sh
clear
echo "HELLO WORLD"

Can anyone please tell me what the significance of the comment #!/bin/sh at the start is?

It's called a shebang, and tells the parent shell which interpreter should be used to execute the script.

#!/bin/sh <--------- bourne shell compatible script
#!/usr/bin/perl  <-- perl script
#!/usr/bin/php  <--- php script
#!/bin/false <------ do-nothing script, because false returns immediately anyways.

Most scripting languages tend to interpret a line starting with # as comment and will ignore the following !/usr/bin/whatever portion, which might otherwise cause a syntax error in the interpreted language.

When you try to execute a program in unix (one with the executable bit set), the operating system will look at the first few bytes of the file. These form the so-called "magic number", which can be used to decide the format of the program and how to execute it.

#! corresponds to the magic number 0x2321 (look it up in an ascii table). When the system sees that the magic number, it knows that it is dealing with a text script and reads until the next \n (there is a limit, but it escapes me atm). Having identified the interpreter (the first argument after the shebang) it will call the interpreter.

Other files also have magic numbers. Try looking at a bitmap (.BMP) file via less and you will see the first two characters are BM. This magic number denotes that the file is indeed a bitmap.

If the file that this script lives in is executable, the hash-bang (#!) tells the operating system what interpreter to use to run the script. In this case it's /bin/sh, for example.

There's a Wikipedia article about it for more information.

The first line tells the shell that if you execute the script directly (./run.sh; as opposed to /bin/sh run.sh), it should use that program (/bin/sh in this case) to interpret it.

You can also use it to pass arguments, commonly -e (exit on error), or use other programs (/bin/awk, /usr/bin/perl, etc).

#!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash has to be first line of the script because if you don't use it on the first line then the system will treat all the commands in that script as different commands. If the first line is #!/bin/sh then it will consider all commands as a one script and it will show the that this file is running in ps command and not the commands inside the file.

./echo.sh

ps -ef |grep echo
trainee   3036  2717  0 16:24 pts/0    00:00:00 /bin/sh ./echo.sh
root      3042  2912  0 16:24 pts/1    00:00:00 grep --color=auto echo