The Anonymous monk below points me back to the source documentation, where I find nothing on this particular question,

Why? Searching for the error "Skipping user-data as it does not begin with #!" I found ec2-run-user-data, the program you appeared to be the trying to run. It does't mention base64.

Net::Amazon::EC2 is just an interface to some amazon API, the important docs would be found on amazon.

In reply to Re: Net::Amazon::EC2 loses pound-shebang when base64'd by Anonymous Monk
in thread Net::Amazon::EC2 loses pound-shebang when base64'd by hesco

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