Fortran: odd space-padding string behavior when opening files - string

Question

I have a Fortran program which reads data from a bunch of input files. The first file contains, among other things, the names of three other files that I will read from, specified in the input file (which I redirect to stdin at execution of the program) as follows
"data/file_1.dat" "data/file2.dat" "data/file_number_3.txt"
They're separated by regular spaces and there's no trailing spaces on the line, just a line break. I read the file names like this:
character*30 fnames(3)
read *, fnames
and then I proceed to read the data, through calling on a function which takes the file name as parameter:
subroutine read_from_data_file(fname)
implicit none
character*(*) fname
open(15,file=fname)
! read some data
end subroutine read_from_data_file
! in the main program:
do i=1,3
call read_from_data_file(trim(fnames(i)))
end do
For the third file, regardless of in which order I put the file names in the input file, the padding doesn't work and Fortran tries to open a with a name like "data/file_number_3.txt ", i.e. with a bunch of trailing spaces. This creates an empty file named data/file_number_3.txt (White Space Conflict) in my folder, and as soon as I try to read from the file the program crashes with an EOF error.
I've tried adding trim() in various places, e.g. open(15,file=trim(fname)) without any success. I assume it has something to do with the fix length of character arrays in Fortran, but I thought trim() would take care of that - is that assumption incorrect?
How do I troubleshoot and fix this?

Answer 1

Hmmm. I wonder if there is a final character on the last line of your input file which is not whitespace, such as an EOF marker from a Linux system popping up on a Windows system or vice-versa. Try, if you are on a Linux box, dos2unix; on a Windows box try something else (I'm not sure what).
If that doesn't work, try using the intrinsic IACHAR function to examine each individual character in the misbehaving string and examine the entrails.
Like you, I expect trim to trim trailing whitespace from a string, but not all the characters which are not displayed are regarded as whitespace.
And, while I'm writing, your use of declarations such as
character*30
is obsolescent, the modern alternative is
character(len=30)
and
character(len=*)
is preferred to
character*(*)
EDIT
Have you tried both reading those names from a file and reading them from stdin ?