Sep 20 2009

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 0x0D,0x0A. 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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