I am definitely a fan of the octothorpe bang (shebang) myself. Often times I have folks running scripts that I have written that aren't necessarily the sharpest tools in the shed and I don't want to cause them to have to think.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
##################################################
#
use strict;
[download]

Above is the most common way I start my scripts.

Other variants include specific paths to a particular version of Perl. I bring that up because one financial house (that will not be named here) that I worked for used AFS to mount shared distributions of code including such things as Perl. We must have had at any given time 5 versions and/or patch levels of Perl being shared. One of the issues that caused was you really could not always predict which version /usr/bin/perl was.

My defense against my scripts being run by a older version than I wanted was to give the full path to the version I wanted in the shebang line. For instance:

#!/a/software/local/perl/perl-5.6.1/bin/perl -w 
###############################################
#
use strict;
[download]

---

Peter L. Berghold	Brewer of Belgian Ales
Peter@Berghold.Net	www.berghold.net
Unix Professional

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