Character encoding after shebang in shell scripts?

Question

I came across some Ruby scripts on Github. The first line is the normal shebang (#!/usr/bin/ruby), but the second line is the following:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

I didn't know this method of declaring character encoding! Is this just a Ruby thing, or can I use it (for example) in Bash scripts as well?

Answer 1

That's actually the emacs way of defining character encoding.

It's not just a Ruby thing as Python understands it too. But, Bash knows nothing of it.