Ubuntu 14.04 Cron outputs file names with ^M at the end - cron

When I pipe output to a file in a cron job using the > operator, it always appends a ^M to the end of the file name. This shows up as a ? when I run ls in the directory but reveals itself as ^M when I edit the file in nano and go to save.
For example this command:
locale > locale.txt
Outputs a file named "locale.txt?" (i.e. "locale.txt^M")
I don't know why it does this, but I'm guessing it has something to do with environment variables. When I use > from a terminal it behaves properly. I've searched Google for this problem but apparently it doesn't like all these special characters in the query so I haven't found anything.
I've tried using mv to change the file name back to normal but it doesn't recognize the ? or the ^M character when I type in the file name.
I've seen that perhaps this is the carriage return "\r" character but I don't know why cron would put a Windows newline on the end of my file name. All help is appreciated. Thanks!

The problem is with the cron or script file itself: it has DOS line separators (CRLF) instead of Unix (LF only). You can fix it using dos2unix.

Related

difference between duplicating a shell script by copy pasting the file itself and copying the contents of the file and pasting it [duplicate]

I am making an NW.js app on macOS, and want to run the app in dev mode
by double-clicking on an icon.
In the first step, I'm trying to make my shell script work.
Using VS Code on Windows (I wanted to gain time), I have created a run-nw file at the root of my project, containing this:
#!/bin/bash
cd "src"
npm install
cd ..
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &
but I get this output:
$ sh ./run-nw
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
: No such file or directory
Usage: npm <command>
where <command> is one of: (snip commands list)
(snip npm help)
npm#3.10.3 /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
Some things I don't understand.
It seems that it takes empty lines as commands.
In my editor (VS Code) I have tried to replace \r\n with \n
(in case the \r creates problems) but it changes nothing.
It seems that it doesn't find the folders
(with or without the dirname instruction),
or maybe it doesn't know about the cd command ?
It seems that it doesn't understand the install argument to npm.
The part that really weirds me out, is that it still runs the app
(if I did an npm install manually)...
Not able to make it work properly, and suspecting something weird with
the file itself, I created a new one directly on the Mac, using vim this time.
I entered the exact same instructions, and... now it works without any
issues.
A diff on the two files reveals exactly zero difference.
What can be the difference? What can make the first script not work? How can I find out?
Update
Following the accepted answer's recommendations, after the wrong line
endings came back, I checked multiple things.
It turns out that since I copied my ~/.gitconfig from my Windows
machine, I had autocrlf=true, so every time I modified the bash
file under Windows, it re-set the line endings to \r\n.
So, in addition to running dos2unix (which you will have to
install using Homebrew on a Mac), if you're using Git, check your
.gitconfig file.
Yes. Bash scripts are sensitive to line-endings, both in the script itself and in data it processes. They should have Unix-style line-endings, i.e., each line is terminated with a Line Feed character (decimal 10, hex 0A in ASCII).
DOS/Windows line endings in the script
With Windows or DOS-style line endings , each line is terminated with a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed character. You can see this otherwise invisible character in the output of cat -v yourfile:
$ cat -v yourfile
#!/bin/bash^M
^M
cd "src"^M
npm install^M
^M
cd ..^M
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
In this case, the carriage return (^M in caret notation or \r in C escape notation) is not treated as whitespace. Bash interprets the first line after the shebang (consisting of a single carriage return character) as the name of a command/program to run.
Since there is no command named ^M, it prints : command not found
Since there is no directory named "src"^M (or src^M), it prints : No such file or directory
It passes install^M instead of install as an argument to npm which causes npm to complain.
DOS/Windows line endings in input data
Like above, if you have an input file with carriage returns:
hello^M
world^M
then it will look completely normal in editors and when writing it to screen, but tools may produce strange results. For example, grep will fail to find lines that are obviously there:
$ grep 'hello$' file.txt || grep -x "hello" file.txt
(no match because the line actually ends in ^M)
Appended text will instead overwrite the line because the carriage returns moves the cursor to the start of the line:
$ sed -e 's/$/!/' file.txt
!ello
!orld
String comparison will seem to fail, even though strings appear to be the same when writing to screen:
$ a="hello"; read b < file.txt
$ if [[ "$a" = "$b" ]]
then echo "Variables are equal."
else echo "Sorry, $a is not equal to $b"
fi
Sorry, hello is not equal to hello
Solutions
The solution is to convert the file to use Unix-style line endings. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished:
This can be done using the dos2unix program:
dos2unix filename
Open the file in a capable text editor (Sublime, Notepad++, not Notepad) and configure it to save files with Unix line endings, e.g., with Vim, run the following command before (re)saving:
:set fileformat=unix
If you have a version of the sed utility that supports the -i or --in-place option, e.g., GNU sed, you could run the following command to strip trailing carriage returns:
sed -i 's/\r$//' filename
With other versions of sed, you could use output redirection to write to a new file. Be sure to use a different filename for the redirection target (it can be renamed later).
sed 's/\r$//' filename > filename.unix
Similarly, the tr translation filter can be used to delete unwanted characters from its input:
tr -d '\r' <filename >filename.unix
Cygwin Bash
With the Bash port for Cygwin, there’s a custom igncr option that can be set to ignore the Carriage Return in line endings (presumably because many of its users use native Windows programs to edit their text files).
This can be enabled for the current shell by running set -o igncr.
Setting this option applies only to the current shell process so it can be useful when sourcing files with extraneous carriage returns. If you regularly encounter shell scripts with DOS line endings and want this option to be set permanently, you could set an environment variable called SHELLOPTS (all capital letters) to include igncr. This environment variable is used by Bash to set shell options when it starts (before reading any startup files).
Useful utilities
The file utility is useful for quickly seeing which line endings are used in a text file. Here’s what it prints for for each file type:
Unix line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable
Mac line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CR line terminators
DOS line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CRLF line terminators
The GNU version of the cat utility has a -v, --show-nonprinting option that displays non-printing characters.
The dos2unix utility is specifically written for converting text files between Unix, Mac and DOS line endings.
Useful links
Wikipedia has an excellent article covering the many different ways of marking the end of a line of text, the history of such encodings and how newlines are treated in different operating systems, programming languages and Internet protocols (e.g., FTP).
Files with classic Mac OS line endings
With Classic Mac OS (pre-OS X), each line was terminated with a Carriage Return (decimal 13, hex 0D in ASCII). If a script file was saved with such line endings, Bash would only see one long line like so:
#!/bin/bash^M^Mcd "src"^Mnpm install^M^Mcd ..^M./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
Since this single long line begins with an octothorpe (#), Bash treats the line (and the whole file) as a single comment.
Note: In 2001, Apple launched Mac OS X which was based on the BSD-derived NeXTSTEP operating system. As a result, OS X also uses Unix-style LF-only line endings and since then, text files terminated with a CR have become extremely rare. Nevertheless, I think it’s worthwhile to show how Bash would attempt to interpret such files.
On JetBrains products (PyCharm, PHPStorm, IDEA, etc.), you'll need to click on CRLF/LF to toggle between the two types of line separators (\r\n and \n).
I was trying to startup my docker container from Windows and got this:
Bash script and /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I was using git bash and the problem was about the git config, then I just did the steps below and it worked. It will configure Git to not convert line endings on checkout:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
delete your local repository
clone it again.
Many thanks to Jason Harmon in this link:
https://forums.docker.com/t/error-while-running-docker-code-in-powershell/34059/6
Before that, I tried this, that didn't works:
dos2unix scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/\r$//' scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/^M$//' scriptname.sh
If you're using the read command to read from a file (or pipe) that is (or might be) in DOS/Windows format, you can take advantage of the fact that read will trim whitespace from the beginning and ends of lines. If you tell it that carriage returns are whitespace (by adding them to the IFS variable), it'll trim them from the ends of lines.
In bash (or zsh or ksh), that means you'd replace this standard idiom:
IFS= read -r somevar # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$'\r' read -r somevar # This *will* trim CR
(Note: the -r option isn't related to this, it's just usually a good idea to avoid mangling backslashes.)
If you're not using the IFS= prefix (e.g. because you want to split the data into fields), then you'd replace this:
read -r field1 field2 ... # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$' \t\n\r' read -r field1 field2 ... # This *will* trim CR
If you're using a shell that doesn't support the $'...' quoting mode (e.g. dash, the default /bin/sh on some Linux distros), or your script even might be run with such a shell, then you need to get a little more complex:
cr="$(printf '\r')"
IFS="$cr" read -r somevar # Read trimming *only* CR
IFS="$IFS$cr" read -r field1 field2 ... # Read trimming CR and whitespace, and splitting fields
Note that normally, when you change IFS, you should put it back to normal as soon as possible to avoid weird side effects; but in all these cases, it's a prefix to the read command, so it only affects that one command and doesn't have to be reset afterward.
Coming from a duplicate, if the problem is that you have files whose names contain ^M at the end, you can rename them with
for f in *$'\r'; do
mv "$f" "${f%$'\r'}"
done
You properly want to fix whatever caused these files to have broken names in the first place (probably a script which created them should be dos2unixed and then rerun?) but sometimes this is not feasible.
The $'\r' syntax is Bash-specific; if you have a different shell, maybe you need to use some other notation. Perhaps see also Difference between sh and bash
Since VS Code is being used, we can see CRLF or LF in the bottom right depending on what's being used and if we click on it we can change between them (LF is being used in below example):
We can also use the "Change End of Line Sequence" command from the command pallet. Whatever's easier to remember since they're functionally the same.
One more way to get rid of the unwanted CR ('\r') character is to run the tr command, for example:
$ tr -d '\r' < dosScript.py > nixScript.py
I ran into this issue when I use git with WSL.
git has a feature where it changes the line-ending of files according to the OS you are using, on Windows it make sure the line endings are \r\n which is not compatible with Linux which uses only \n.
You can resolve this problem by adding a file name .gitattributes to your git root directory and add lines as following:
config/* text eol=lf
run.sh text eol=lf
In this example all files inside config directory will have only line-feed line ending and run.sh file as well.
For Notepad++ users, this can be solved by:
The simplest way on MAC / Linux - create a file using 'touch' command, open this file with VI or VIM editor, paste your code and save. This would automatically remove the windows characters.
If you are using a text editor like BBEdit you can do it at the status bar. There is a selection where you can switch.
For IntelliJ users, here is the solution for writing Linux script.
Use LF - Unix and masOS (\n)
Scripts may call each other.
An even better magic solution is to convert all scripts in the folder/subfolders:
find . -name "*.sh" -exec sed -i -e 's/\r$//' {} +
You can use dos2unix too but many servers do not have it installed by default.
For the sake of completeness, I'll point out another solution which can solve this problem permanently without the need to run dos2unix all the time:
sudo ln -s /bin/bash `printf 'bash\r'`

Unexpected EOF syntax error at the actual end of the file, without any syntax errors [duplicate]

I am making an NW.js app on macOS, and want to run the app in dev mode
by double-clicking on an icon.
In the first step, I'm trying to make my shell script work.
Using VS Code on Windows (I wanted to gain time), I have created a run-nw file at the root of my project, containing this:
#!/bin/bash
cd "src"
npm install
cd ..
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &
but I get this output:
$ sh ./run-nw
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
: No such file or directory
Usage: npm <command>
where <command> is one of: (snip commands list)
(snip npm help)
npm#3.10.3 /usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm
: command not found
: No such file or directory
: command not found
Some things I don't understand.
It seems that it takes empty lines as commands.
In my editor (VS Code) I have tried to replace \r\n with \n
(in case the \r creates problems) but it changes nothing.
It seems that it doesn't find the folders
(with or without the dirname instruction),
or maybe it doesn't know about the cd command ?
It seems that it doesn't understand the install argument to npm.
The part that really weirds me out, is that it still runs the app
(if I did an npm install manually)...
Not able to make it work properly, and suspecting something weird with
the file itself, I created a new one directly on the Mac, using vim this time.
I entered the exact same instructions, and... now it works without any
issues.
A diff on the two files reveals exactly zero difference.
What can be the difference? What can make the first script not work? How can I find out?
Update
Following the accepted answer's recommendations, after the wrong line
endings came back, I checked multiple things.
It turns out that since I copied my ~/.gitconfig from my Windows
machine, I had autocrlf=true, so every time I modified the bash
file under Windows, it re-set the line endings to \r\n.
So, in addition to running dos2unix (which you will have to
install using Homebrew on a Mac), if you're using Git, check your
.gitconfig file.
Yes. Bash scripts are sensitive to line-endings, both in the script itself and in data it processes. They should have Unix-style line-endings, i.e., each line is terminated with a Line Feed character (decimal 10, hex 0A in ASCII).
DOS/Windows line endings in the script
With Windows or DOS-style line endings , each line is terminated with a Carriage Return followed by a Line Feed character. You can see this otherwise invisible character in the output of cat -v yourfile:
$ cat -v yourfile
#!/bin/bash^M
^M
cd "src"^M
npm install^M
^M
cd ..^M
./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
In this case, the carriage return (^M in caret notation or \r in C escape notation) is not treated as whitespace. Bash interprets the first line after the shebang (consisting of a single carriage return character) as the name of a command/program to run.
Since there is no command named ^M, it prints : command not found
Since there is no directory named "src"^M (or src^M), it prints : No such file or directory
It passes install^M instead of install as an argument to npm which causes npm to complain.
DOS/Windows line endings in input data
Like above, if you have an input file with carriage returns:
hello^M
world^M
then it will look completely normal in editors and when writing it to screen, but tools may produce strange results. For example, grep will fail to find lines that are obviously there:
$ grep 'hello$' file.txt || grep -x "hello" file.txt
(no match because the line actually ends in ^M)
Appended text will instead overwrite the line because the carriage returns moves the cursor to the start of the line:
$ sed -e 's/$/!/' file.txt
!ello
!orld
String comparison will seem to fail, even though strings appear to be the same when writing to screen:
$ a="hello"; read b < file.txt
$ if [[ "$a" = "$b" ]]
then echo "Variables are equal."
else echo "Sorry, $a is not equal to $b"
fi
Sorry, hello is not equal to hello
Solutions
The solution is to convert the file to use Unix-style line endings. There are a number of ways this can be accomplished:
This can be done using the dos2unix program:
dos2unix filename
Open the file in a capable text editor (Sublime, Notepad++, not Notepad) and configure it to save files with Unix line endings, e.g., with Vim, run the following command before (re)saving:
:set fileformat=unix
If you have a version of the sed utility that supports the -i or --in-place option, e.g., GNU sed, you could run the following command to strip trailing carriage returns:
sed -i 's/\r$//' filename
With other versions of sed, you could use output redirection to write to a new file. Be sure to use a different filename for the redirection target (it can be renamed later).
sed 's/\r$//' filename > filename.unix
Similarly, the tr translation filter can be used to delete unwanted characters from its input:
tr -d '\r' <filename >filename.unix
Cygwin Bash
With the Bash port for Cygwin, there’s a custom igncr option that can be set to ignore the Carriage Return in line endings (presumably because many of its users use native Windows programs to edit their text files).
This can be enabled for the current shell by running set -o igncr.
Setting this option applies only to the current shell process so it can be useful when sourcing files with extraneous carriage returns. If you regularly encounter shell scripts with DOS line endings and want this option to be set permanently, you could set an environment variable called SHELLOPTS (all capital letters) to include igncr. This environment variable is used by Bash to set shell options when it starts (before reading any startup files).
Useful utilities
The file utility is useful for quickly seeing which line endings are used in a text file. Here’s what it prints for for each file type:
Unix line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable
Mac line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CR line terminators
DOS line endings: Bourne-Again shell script, ASCII text executable, with CRLF line terminators
The GNU version of the cat utility has a -v, --show-nonprinting option that displays non-printing characters.
The dos2unix utility is specifically written for converting text files between Unix, Mac and DOS line endings.
Useful links
Wikipedia has an excellent article covering the many different ways of marking the end of a line of text, the history of such encodings and how newlines are treated in different operating systems, programming languages and Internet protocols (e.g., FTP).
Files with classic Mac OS line endings
With Classic Mac OS (pre-OS X), each line was terminated with a Carriage Return (decimal 13, hex 0D in ASCII). If a script file was saved with such line endings, Bash would only see one long line like so:
#!/bin/bash^M^Mcd "src"^Mnpm install^M^Mcd ..^M./tools/nwjs-sdk-v0.17.3-osx-x64/nwjs.app/Contents/MacOS/nwjs "src" &^M
Since this single long line begins with an octothorpe (#), Bash treats the line (and the whole file) as a single comment.
Note: In 2001, Apple launched Mac OS X which was based on the BSD-derived NeXTSTEP operating system. As a result, OS X also uses Unix-style LF-only line endings and since then, text files terminated with a CR have become extremely rare. Nevertheless, I think it’s worthwhile to show how Bash would attempt to interpret such files.
On JetBrains products (PyCharm, PHPStorm, IDEA, etc.), you'll need to click on CRLF/LF to toggle between the two types of line separators (\r\n and \n).
I was trying to startup my docker container from Windows and got this:
Bash script and /bin/bash^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I was using git bash and the problem was about the git config, then I just did the steps below and it worked. It will configure Git to not convert line endings on checkout:
git config --global core.autocrlf input
delete your local repository
clone it again.
Many thanks to Jason Harmon in this link:
https://forums.docker.com/t/error-while-running-docker-code-in-powershell/34059/6
Before that, I tried this, that didn't works:
dos2unix scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/\r$//' scriptname.sh
sed -i -e 's/^M$//' scriptname.sh
If you're using the read command to read from a file (or pipe) that is (or might be) in DOS/Windows format, you can take advantage of the fact that read will trim whitespace from the beginning and ends of lines. If you tell it that carriage returns are whitespace (by adding them to the IFS variable), it'll trim them from the ends of lines.
In bash (or zsh or ksh), that means you'd replace this standard idiom:
IFS= read -r somevar # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$'\r' read -r somevar # This *will* trim CR
(Note: the -r option isn't related to this, it's just usually a good idea to avoid mangling backslashes.)
If you're not using the IFS= prefix (e.g. because you want to split the data into fields), then you'd replace this:
read -r field1 field2 ... # This will not trim CR
with this:
IFS=$' \t\n\r' read -r field1 field2 ... # This *will* trim CR
If you're using a shell that doesn't support the $'...' quoting mode (e.g. dash, the default /bin/sh on some Linux distros), or your script even might be run with such a shell, then you need to get a little more complex:
cr="$(printf '\r')"
IFS="$cr" read -r somevar # Read trimming *only* CR
IFS="$IFS$cr" read -r field1 field2 ... # Read trimming CR and whitespace, and splitting fields
Note that normally, when you change IFS, you should put it back to normal as soon as possible to avoid weird side effects; but in all these cases, it's a prefix to the read command, so it only affects that one command and doesn't have to be reset afterward.
Coming from a duplicate, if the problem is that you have files whose names contain ^M at the end, you can rename them with
for f in *$'\r'; do
mv "$f" "${f%$'\r'}"
done
You properly want to fix whatever caused these files to have broken names in the first place (probably a script which created them should be dos2unixed and then rerun?) but sometimes this is not feasible.
The $'\r' syntax is Bash-specific; if you have a different shell, maybe you need to use some other notation. Perhaps see also Difference between sh and bash
Since VS Code is being used, we can see CRLF or LF in the bottom right depending on what's being used and if we click on it we can change between them (LF is being used in below example):
We can also use the "Change End of Line Sequence" command from the command pallet. Whatever's easier to remember since they're functionally the same.
One more way to get rid of the unwanted CR ('\r') character is to run the tr command, for example:
$ tr -d '\r' < dosScript.py > nixScript.py
I ran into this issue when I use git with WSL.
git has a feature where it changes the line-ending of files according to the OS you are using, on Windows it make sure the line endings are \r\n which is not compatible with Linux which uses only \n.
You can resolve this problem by adding a file name .gitattributes to your git root directory and add lines as following:
config/* text eol=lf
run.sh text eol=lf
In this example all files inside config directory will have only line-feed line ending and run.sh file as well.
For Notepad++ users, this can be solved by:
The simplest way on MAC / Linux - create a file using 'touch' command, open this file with VI or VIM editor, paste your code and save. This would automatically remove the windows characters.
If you are using a text editor like BBEdit you can do it at the status bar. There is a selection where you can switch.
For IntelliJ users, here is the solution for writing Linux script.
Use LF - Unix and masOS (\n)
Scripts may call each other.
An even better magic solution is to convert all scripts in the folder/subfolders:
find . -name "*.sh" -exec sed -i -e 's/\r$//' {} +
You can use dos2unix too but many servers do not have it installed by default.
For the sake of completeness, I'll point out another solution which can solve this problem permanently without the need to run dos2unix all the time:
sudo ln -s /bin/bash `printf 'bash\r'`

dos2unix doesn't convert ^M

I exported results in a text file from a program running on Windows 7, and copied the file on Xubuntu 14.04. In a terminal, I ran dos2unix file.txt, which tells me converting file out_mapqtl.txt to Unix format. However, when I look at the file with less, I still see the Windows end-of-line as ^M, and wc -l returns me "0".
I tried several things described here, but none works. I then opened the file in Vim and did :%s/\r/\r/g as explained there, which worked fine. So any idea why dos2unix didn't work? Would there be a way to avoid opening Vim every time?
I know you have gotten this resolved, but I wanted to add a note for reference, based on some testing I've done.
If less is showing ^M, then like Sybren I suspect it is a MAC style ending (\r), not DOS (\r\n). You can determine that easily using cat:
$ cat -e filename
Unix endings (\n) show as $
MAC endings (\r) show as ^M (less shows these)
DOS\Windows endings (\r\n) show as ^M$ (less does not appear to show these)
Use dos2unix to get rid of the DOS (^M$) endings
Use mac2unix to get rid of the MAC (^M) endings - dos2unix won't get rid of these.
I had a file where I had to use dos2unix and mac2unix to get rid of all the non-Unix endings.
\r denotes a carriage return, and on MAC it is used without \n to denote a line break. Are you sure the file is in DOS (\r\n) format and not MAC (\r)?
If VIM really turns out to be the only thing that'll repair your files, you can also invoke it as:
vim somefile.txt +"%s/\r/\r/g" +wq
This will open the file, perform the operation, save it, then quit.
Can you give us an example of the file, so that we can investigate further?
Try this:
tr -d '\r' < file
I have used Notepad++ feature:
Edit>EOL Conversions>Unix(LF).
Now export this file to the Unix machine using pscp.exe.
Let me know if that worked for you.

Why control characters appended after bash command?

I used the bash commands to append several lines to multiple configuration files:
> for filename in *.ovpn; do
> printf 'configurationscript-security 2\nup /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf\ndown /etc/openvpn/update-resolv-conf' >> $filename;
> done
However the control character "^M" appeared at end of each line in the configuration file:
I opened the files in vim, the files before bash commands looked like as folows:
I am curious why "^M" appears at end of each line? Thanks.
It is Windows' carriage return, use dos2unix to convert file. Vim recognize the file format and displays it correctly.
The ^M can also be removed via a regular expression in vim, if dos2unix isn't available.
:%s/^M//g, which can be entered as: Esc:%s/ctrl+Vctrl+M//g
Not sure why this has occurred for you with just a simple printf command on a linux system, maybe have a look that you're picking up the correct version of printf. I've given this a go on a linux system, and the local printf keeps the correct line-endings, as you would expect.

Bash script prints "Command Not Found" on empty lines

Every time I run a script using bash scriptname.sh from the command line in Debian, I get Command Not found and then the result of the script.
The script works but there is always a Command Not Found statement printed on screen for each empty line. Each blank line is resulting in a command not found.
I am running the script from the /var folder.
Here is the script:
#!/bin/bash
echo Hello World
I run it by typing the following:
bash testscript.sh
Why would this occur?
Make sure your first line is:
#!/bin/bash
Enter your path to bash if it is not /bin/bash
Try running:
dos2unix script.sh
That wil convert line endings, etc from Windows to unix format. i.e. it strips \r (CR) from line endings to change them from \r\n (CR+LF) to \n (LF).
More details about the dos2unix command (man page)
Another way to tell if your file is in dos/Win format:
cat scriptname.sh | sed 's/\r/<CR>/'
The output will look something like this:
#!/bin/sh<CR>
<CR>
echo Hello World<CR>
<CR>
This will output the entire file text with <CR> displayed for each \r character in the file.
You can use bash -x scriptname.sh to trace it.
I also ran into a similar issue. The issue seems to be permissions. If you do an ls -l, you may be able to identify that your file may NOT have the execute bit turned on. This will NOT allow the script to execute. :)
As #artooro added in comment:
To fix that issue run chmod +x testscript.sh
This might be trivial and not related to the OP's question, but I often made this mistaken at the beginning when I was learning scripting
VAR_NAME = $(hostname)
echo "the hostname is ${VAR_NAME}"
This will produce 'command not found' response. The correct way is to eliminate the spaces
VAR_NAME=$(hostname)
On Bash for Windows I've tried incorrectly to run
run_me.sh
without ./ at the beginning and got the same error.
For people with Windows background the correct form looks redundant:
./run_me.sh
If the script does its job (relatively) well, then it's running okay. Your problem is probably a single line in the file referencing a program that's either not on the path, not installed, misspelled, or something similar.
One way is to place a set -x at the top of your script or run it with bash -x instead of just bash - this will output the lines before executing them and you usually just need to look at the command output immediately before the error to see what's causing the problem
If, as you say, it's the blank lines causing the problems, you might want to check what's actaully in them. Run:
od -xcb testscript.sh
and make sure there's no "invisible" funny characters like the CTRL-M (carriage return) you may get by using a Windows-type editor.
use dos2unix on your script file.
for executing that you must provide full path of that
for example
/home/Manuel/mywrittenscript
Try chmod u+x testscript.sh
I know it from here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/red-hat-31/running-shell-script-command-not-found-202062/
If you have Notepad++ and you get this .sh Error Message: "command not found"
or this autoconf Error Message "line 615:
../../autoconf/bin/autom4te: No such file or directory".
On your Notepad++, Go to Edit -> EOL Conversion then check Macinthos(CR).
This will edit your files. I also encourage to check all files with this command,
because soon such an error will occur.
Had the same problem. Unfortunately
dos2unix winfile.sh
bash: dos2unix: command not found
so I did this to convert.
awk '{ sub("\r$", ""); print }' winfile.sh > unixfile.sh
and then
bash unixfile.sh
Problems with running scripts may also be connected to bad formatting of multi-line commands, for example if you have a whitespace character after line-breaking "\". E.g. this:
./run_me.sh \
--with-some parameter
(please note the extra space after "\") will cause problems, but when you remove that space, it will run perfectly fine.
I was also having some of the Cannot execute command. Everything looked correct, but in fact I was having a non-breakable space right before my command which was ofcourse impossible to spot with the naked eye:
if [[ "true" ]]; then
highlight --syntax js "var i = 0;"
fi
Which, in Vim, looked like:
if [[ "true" ]]; then
highlight --syntax js "var i = 0;"
fi
Only after running the Bash script checker shellcheck did I find the problem.
I ran into this today, absentmindedly copying the dollar command prompt $ (ahead of a command string) into the script.
Make sure you haven´t override the 'PATH' variable by mistake like this:
#!/bin/bash
PATH="/home/user/Pictures/"; # do NOT do this
This was my mistake.
Add the current directory ( . ) to PATH to be able to execute a script, just by typing in its name, that resides in the current directory:
PATH=.:$PATH
You may want to update you .bashrc and .bash_profile files with aliases to recognize the command you are entering.
.bashrc and .bash_profile files are hidden files probably located on your C: drive where you save your program files.

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