Hello,

I was working on some shell scripts for a VMWare server I've inherited (I'm not a linux admin... yet) and had some strange behavior going on.

I was writing the shell scripts on my windows machine in Notepad++ and then copying the script files over to the linux VM server. Whenever I would go to execute the script, it wouldn't work right. What I mean is that I would get errors for unknown commands, seemingly like the script was only running part of the commands on the line.

An example is if I had a line with "clear" on it, the script appeared to be only running "cle" and then throwing an error saying "unknown command cle".

Is this common when moving files from windows to linux? I rewrote the script from scratch using Vi in the SSH session and everything worked fine.

Is there a special way to save files on windows so they don't have problems in Linux? Script files are obviously nothing but plain text, so I'm not sure what was happening.

One issue is that Windows tends to use "\r\n" (carriage-return line-feed) at the end of each line, while Linus (and other *nixes) use simply "\n". I think Notepad++ should have a setting to save in the appropriate format, somewhere in the preferences (I know that Notepad2 does).

If you open the files in vi, you are likely to see that they have "^M" at the end of each line. Entering the following command should solve the problem:
By Ctrl-V I mean (of course) "hold down the Ctrl key and press V" (likewise with M) - This will enter a "^M" character. 1,$ addresses every line from first to last.

Hope this helps.
Rob

A windows editor adds carriage returns after newlines. You can run "dos2unix" on the script to convert it. You can also install cygwin and an editor like vi locally.