Newline Madness in Bash Script

Question

i have a bash script I edit on windows using UltraEdit and save as UTF-8 No BOM, using Unix Line Terminator style, as specified in the "save as" dialog box in UE.

I then upload it to a centos 5 x86 machine running parallels virtuozzo, and everytime, no matter how i upload it (FTP as binary file, or via parallels management console), the script wont work. When i view the script via parallels management console i see that the LAST, and ONLY the last line, has a weird character in it. If i remove the line terminator from the last line (let the script end at the last printable character) everything works fine.

My questions:

A) why is only the LAST line terminator causing problems?

B) how do i avoid this in the future?

thanks!

Answer 1

firstly i would recommend you transfer as binary.. since you seem to know exactly the format you want..

ASCII/text FTP is known for doing line-ending conversion when you dont want it too.

Answer 2

The next step is to do a hexdump on the file and see what is in there. This sounds very much like there is a bare CR in there. Remember that carriage return means "write the next character in position 0 of the current row". Try running hexdump -C file or even od -t x1 file and look for 0A and 0D (0D=CR, 0A=LF).

Answer 3

you can just run dos2unix to get rid of them..

Answer 4

There are two issues here: First, assuming the editor saves with Unix line endings, you should use binary FTP, not ASCII. Second, and this is puzzling, the editor seems to be inserting a CTRL-Z at the end of the file (which has not been necessary since the late eighties AFAIK).

Do save a file consisting of a single line, transfer it to the Unix system via usual means and use:

xxd myscript.sh

to see if the last byte in the file is 0x1a to verify if my theory is correct.

Answer 5

you could just edit the script remotely.

emacs/vim/nano etc. works well over putty. if you like emacs, you can also use tramp to edit remote files with the emacs running on whatever machine you happen to be sitting in front of, though I haven't used tramp with windows. komodo-edit as remote editing as well, and while I highly recommend komodo-edit, i haven't used the remote feature.

Answer 6

I used CTRL-H on Ultraedit, which displays the same output as unix's XXD command, and I see the 0D 0A in there, though the file is set to use UNIX line terminators. this is an Ultraedit problem. Im using v 13.20a.

I am new to stackoverflow. should i open a new question or re-tag this one?

thanks to all