How does shebangs and portability interact with Unicode and encodings?

In Perl, the shebang line (#!) at the top of a script informs the operating system about the interpreter that should run the script. This can have implications for portability, especially when dealing with Unicode and different encodings. When a shebang specifies a Perl interpreter, it's essential to ensure that the version specified supports Unicode properly and that the script itself is encoded in a way that the interpreter can handle.

For enhanced portability, it's recommended to explicitly set the encoding in your Perl scripts using the `utf8` pragma or declare the encoding with the `use open` pragma. This ensures that both your source code and input/output operations are treated as UTF-8, eliminating issues when the script is moved between different environments.

Here's an example of a Perl script that includes a shebang, sets UTF-8 encoding, and prints a Unicode string:

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; use utf8; # Allows UTF-8 encoded source print "Hello, 世界!\n"; # Prints "Hello, World!" in Chinese

Perl shebang Unicode encodings portability utf8 source code