mac osx terminal : bad interpreter

Question

I have a directory structure that looks something like this :

env/
    bin/
        pip
        easy_install
        python
    include/
        ...
    lib/
        ...

when I run the command the command : ls env/bin
the terminal output is :
activate easy_install-2.7 python2 activate.csh pip python2.7 activate.fish pip2 wheel activate_this.py pip2.7 easy_install python

when I run the command : env/bin/python the python interpreter fires up.
But when I run the command : env/bin/pip the terminal output is :
-bash: bin/pip: "/Users/ironstein/Documents/projects: bad interpreter: No such file or directory I don't understand this. Please help.

Answer 1

There is probably a space after projects in the name of one of your parent folders. The shebang ( #!... ) line in env/bin/pip probably looks something like this:

#!"/Users/ironstein/Documents/projects ..."

which is an attempt to quote the path, but OS X doesn't support quoting spaces or any form of escaping in the shebang line. You need to rename projects ... so it doesn't have spaces in it, and recreate your virtualenv.