Why does passing arguments to the command in an env invocation not work?

Question

I have a shell script to run node with some arguments like so:

#!/usr/bin/env node --harmony_proxies
...

This works fine under OS X but in Ubuntu it errors with:

/usr/bin/env: node --harmony_proxies: No such file or directory

Node is definitely installed and on the PATH since if I remove the --harmony_proxies flag it works fine. Is there some different way of passing arguments when using env in Ubuntu?

Answer 1

On Linux, the entire string following the interpreter name is passed as a single argument to the interpreter, and this string can include white space. [1] Thus, command line arguments are not split, and env command is trying to execute node --harmony_proxies file, which obviously could not be found. See here and here for more details.

Here is an alternative solution for you:

#!/bin/sh
exec node --harmony_proxies "$@"

Hope it helps. Good luck!

Answer 2

If the node command is installed in a fixed location, you can use it directly:

#!/usr/bin/node --harmony_proxies

But if you can't assume that node is installed in a particular location, go with one of the other answers.

Answer 3

If you don't want to modify the source, a wrapper alias might be the right solution.

Example from my .bashrc:

alias how2='/usr/bin/env node --no-deprecation "$(which how2)"'