An old trick for convincing (some) shells that your script is an sh-compatibile shell is to use a colon on the first line. Support for this trick was added to fish back in 2007: https://gitorious.org/~ridiculousfish/fish-shell/fishfish/bl...

Thanks for the pointer. I can't say how much I wish more people would include pointers to code fragments or specific commits on a site called hacker news.

Tangential question: is gitorious's syntax highlighting usually this awful? The first thing I need from syntax highlighting is distinguishing comments from code.

I'm not sure how to use it. Can you give an example of where it works, and what changes if this is not done?