Shebang line with `#!/usr/bin/env command --argument` fails on Linux

Looks like this is because Linux (unlike BSD) only passes a single argument to the shebang command (in this case env).

This has been extensively discussed on StackOverflow.

Found this via @rampion comment:

What happens is that the kernel processes the first two characters of the file looking for #!. If those are found then it skips all space characters looking for a non-space character and extracts the interpreter path which must be a real executable and not another script, although linux extends that to allow recursive script processing. Having found that then it skips to the first non-space character where it takes from there to the next newline character and passes that as a single argument to the command. There is no 'shell' processing of quotes or other meta characters. It is all very simple and brute force. Therefore you cannot get fancy with options there. You get exactly one argument white space included and 'perl -w' is what the kernel sees here and passes on.

Source: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-sh-utils/2002-04/msg00020.html