AFAIR on Linux shebangs only support single argument so it would fail in this case. One can overcome this treating the file as a shell script: #!/bin/sh #

AFAIR on Linux shebangs only support single argument so it would fail in this case. One can overcome this treating the file as a shell script: #!/bin/sh # make ignores next line \ set -e # make ignores next line \ exec make -f "$0" "$@" Make treats slash-escaped new lines as a continuation even for comments, shell does not.