What's the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM?

Question

What\'s different between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without a BOM? Which is better?

Answer 1

One practical difference is that if you write a shell script for Mac OS X and save it as plain UTF-8, you will get the response:

#!/bin/bash: No such file or directory

in response to the shebang line specifying which shell you wish to use:

#!/bin/bash

If you save as UTF-8, no BOM (say in BBEdit) all will be well.