$ cat test.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash -c "echo hello"
$ ./test.sh
/usr/bin/env: ‘bash -c "echo hello"’: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/env: use -[v]S to pass options in shebang lines
$ ./test.sh # with -S
hello
There currently is a patch for adding '-S' to OpenBSD and in the discussion, the one who came originally up with it commented on how he added it to FreeBSD:
"IIRC, the catalyst for it was that early FreeBSD (1990's?) did split up the words on the '#!' line because that seemed convenient. Years later, someone else noticed that this behavior did not match '#!' processing on any other unix, so they changed the behavior so it would match. Someone else then thought that was a bug, because they had scripts which depended on the earlier behavior. I forget how many times the behavior of '#!' processing bounced back and forth, but I had some scripts which ran on multiple versions of Unix and one of these commits broke one of those scripts.
I read up on all the commit-log history, and fixed '#!' processing one more time so that it matched how other unixes do it, and I think I also left comments in the code for that processing to document that "Yes, '#!'-parsing is really supposed to work this way".
And then in an effort to help those people who depended on the earlier behavior, I implemented '-S' to the 'env' command.
I have no idea how much '-S' is used, but it's been in FreeBSD since June 2005, and somewhere along the line those changes were picked up by MacOS 10. The only linux I work on is RHEL, and it looks like Redhat added '-S' between RHEL7 and RHEL8."
[https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=175307781323403&w=2]
FWIW, GNU Coreutils env (as seen for example in my Linux Mint distribution) works the same way (no split by default, enabled by `-S`) and I definitely have used it locally to do things like `#!/usr/bin/env -S python -S -I`.
