Actually I just tried that and it won't work for me unless it's a true executable. If I try to use a perl script it actually gets passed to bash for some reason.

Unless I'm doing something wrong of course...

[root@spoonbill root]$ cat /sbin/parser
#!/usr/bin/perl

while (<>) {
  print "line: $_";
}

[root@spoonbill root]$ cat scr
#!/sbin/parser
this
is
my
file
[download]

This works:

[root@spoonbill root]$ /sbin/parser scr
line: #!/sbin/parser
line: this
line: is
line: my
line: file
line:
[download]

This does not:

[root@spoonbill root]$ ./scr
./scr: line 2: this: command not found
./scr: line 3: is: command not found
./scr: line 4: my: command not found
Usage: file [-bciknsvzL] [-f namefile] [-m magicfiles] file...
Usage: file -C [-m magic]
[download]

(All run as root just in case there was a permission problem)