Equivalent of executing a file (with shebang line) by entering its path?

Question

Say I have a file hello:

#!/bin/sh

echo "Hello World!"

Provided the executable bit is set on that file, I can execute it by entering its path on the prompt:

$ ./hello
Hello World!

Is there a more explicit equivalent to the above? Something akin to:

$ execute hello

I know I can pass hello as an argument to /bin/sh, but I'm looking for a solution that automatically uses the interpreter specified in the shebang line

My use case for this is to execute script files that do not have the executable flag set. These files are stored in a git repository, so I would like to avoid setting their executable flag or having to copy them to another location first.

Answer 1

You can use perl:

perl hello

From perl docs:

If the #! line does not contain the word "perl" nor the word "indir", the program named after the #! is executed instead of the Perl interpreter. This is slightly bizarre, but it helps people on machines that don't do #!, because they can tell a program that their SHELL is /usr/bin/perl, and Perl will then dispatch the program to the correct interpreter for them.

(via)

Answer 2

The following Perl5 script, with no error checking, grabs the hashbang line and calls it to execute the script passed as an argument: (simplifying and streamlining per ilkkachu's comment), to avoid reading the whole file...

open FH, ("<",$ARGV[0])
$line = <FH>;
close FH;
if ($line =~ /^\#\!(.*)/) {
    $engine = $1;
    exec("$engine $ARGV[0]");
}