Make Precompiled Lua Scripts Executable

I didn’t find this clearly spelled out anywhere in the ‘luac’ documentation, but it’s really easy to make precompiled lua scripts executable: just insert a #!/usr/bin/env lua line above luac’s binary output.

This works because luaL_loadfilex() will automatically skip the first line of any file starting with ‘#’–even when loading precompiled chunks!

In Makefiles, you can automate the process:

my-script: my-script.lua
	(echo "#!/usr/bin/env lua"; luac -o - $<) > $@
	chmod +x $@