Why can't I echo the characters #! in a string in bash? [duplicate]

Answer 1

You should use single quotes to prevent string extrapolation:

echo '#!/bin/bash\n/usr/local/bin/tor'

Or you might escape shebang:

echo "#\!/bin/bash\n/usr/local/bin/tor"

Answer 2

try ''s instead of "'s like this ...

$ echo '#!/bin/bash' > thing.sh
$ cat thing.sh
#!/bin/bash

Answer 3

This is not a bug and it has nothing to do with the shebang, just the exclamation point.

Enclosing  characters  in double quotes preserves the literal value of
all characters within the quotes, with the exception of $, `, \,  and,
when  history expansion is enabled, !.

So either escape it, use single quotes, or turn off history expansion.

e.g.

> echo "How dare you put an '!' in this string?"
bash: !: event not found
> set +o histexpand
> echo "How dare you put an '!' in this string?"
How dare you put an '!' in this string?

Answer 4

Two reasons:

One, the difference in behavior between double and single-quoted strings.

"#!/bin/bash\n/usr/local/bin/tor" is "expanded" — that is, the commands within quotes here will be executed first.

Thus,
echo "$(echo foo)" > file puts 'foo' in file, while
echo '$(echo foo)' > file puts '$(echo foo)' in file.

"#!" is a comment, and this does not occur in other shells. If it begins a file (as a shebang), POSIX specifies that this is undefined behavior; but there's no reason why this should be happening here.

Answer 5

Use "\", like:

echo \#\!/whatever > test