Bash Shell Script Error. “bad interpreter: No such file or directory error”

Today I created a simple shell script and I was getting a few odd errors:


cody@taylor:/var/some_folder/server$ ./process_xml.sh
-bash: ./process_xml.sh: /bin/sh^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

I figured it was probably a permissions error or an issue with the shebang (#!/bin/sh) line. I tried removing the shebang line, changing it to use dash or bash explicitly, chmoding to 777 and still no luck and another odd error.


cody@taylor:/var/some_folder/server$ sh process_xml.sh
: not found.sh: 4:

I then checked the log file that the commands were supposed to be writing to and it was filled with ‘^M’ on every line break and the log name itself was followed by a ‘?’. Took a minute or two but I finally clued in that I wrote that script on a windows machine and then exported it to an ubuntu linux server via subversion. It was just a basic text format issue.

Under DOS (Windows/PC) the end of a line of text is signalled using the ASCII code sequence CarriageReturn,LineFeed. Alternately written as CR,LF or the bytes 0×0D,0×0A. On the Macintosh platform, only the CR character is used. Under UNIX, the opposite is true and only the LF character is used.

After a quick :


cody@taylor:/var/some_folder/server$ apt-get install tofrodos
cody@taylor:/var/some_folder/server$ dos2unix process_xml.sh

Everything worked fine.

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