the word "shebang" was a common word in the middle of the last century, so with exclamation point being bang, and i think more likely, shell starting with "sh", it was undoubtedly straight up selected because of the match to the word. "If you put a script in a file and start it with a hash and make it executable, /bin/sh will run the whole shebang for you" would be an accurate use of the word shebang. A similar bit of slang would be "/bin/sh will run the whole shootin' match for you"
>the word "shebang" was a common word in the middle of the last century,
taking just that part of the sentence out of context, that almost reads like some historical tome or some fantasy novel. or maybe it's that i lived a good chunk of the middle of last century and this kind of thing makes realize i've been doing this a lot longer than i'd like to admit
Actually taking that part out of context reminded me that "shebang" is a word outside of technology. It means something like "everything involved", the phrase I'm remembering is "the whole shebang".
> shebang (n.) - 1862, "hut, shed, shelter," popularized among soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, but like other Civil War slang (such as skedaddle) of uncertain origin.
> Perhaps an alteration of shebeen (q.v.), but shebang in the sense "tavern," a seemingly necessary transitional sense, is not attested before 1878 and shebeen seems to have been not much used in the U.S. Bartlett's 1877 edition describes it as "A strange word that had its origin during the late civil war. It is applied alike to a room, a shop, or a hut, a tent, a cabin; an engine house."
> Phrase the whole shebang first recorded 1869, but relation to the earlier use of the word is obscure. Either or both senses also might be mangled pronunciations of French char-à-banc, a bus-like wagon with many seats.
