I never claimed to know Ritchie, it seems your reading skills could use some improvement.

And ive never claimed to know it all, in fact i have claimed i have learned a lot just here at perlmonks. but i did claim i knew why you are looking at your problem wrong (because i suffered from the same problem before), and i pointed out that the shebang line in debian is "working as designed" as described by the guy that first added arguments to it, so it seems my input is at least useful as an educational experience for you. It seems you cannot still understand the problem is not with env, (which is why the "maintainers of GNU coreutils" dont see your situation as a bug) but is with how the shebang line is interpreted when found in something marked as an executable.

as for hubris, you seem to suffer from it more than anyone ive seen since sundialsvc4. Yes i understand "open source" and how you are free to break env if you like, as well as modify how shebang lines are interpreted like apple did. Ive put spaces inside file names so casual users could not touch them, and had a whole class of CMS execs whos names were in lower case for the same reason. If you change env so that it doesnt respect the arguments as passed to it but instead treats all arguments as a single space separated string who knows what mayhem you will unleash. for instance what output should env echo '-n hi there' produce?

or given

ll  /usr/local/bin/with*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 25 Apr 21 01:12 /usr/local/bin/with sp
cat   /usr/local/bin/with*
#/bin/sh
echo 'hi there'
[download]

And saying And GNU env is stupid because it does not behave in a shebang the way rtfm says it should. just shows you are reading the wrong fine manual, what would snark say if env "with sp" tried to execute the command "with" passing it an argument of "sp"?

And i was on PDP-8s before VAX even existed, and used RSTS on lsi-11s before i got to use a VAX-11. While you sure dont seem to be even over 30, you may have used unix on a vax in grade school i guess so maybe you were only still in diapers when i started programming in 1969.

and thanks for showing more reasons why i dont trust apple products, backwards compatibility doesnt seem to mean much to them does it?