She-bang confusion

[pepik_knize]

Greetings Monks,

I keep getting this weird error:
": No such file or directory
or
bash: ./inventory: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

when I remove the -w from #!/usr/bin/perl from the script inventory. If I run any other scripts without flags, it works fine. Here's what I suspect the problem is: inventory was written on a Windows box running cygwin, and I'm modifying and testing it on a Linux laptop (RH 7.2, perl 5.6.0) and desktop (RH 6.2, perl 5.005_03). When I edit it in vim, it displays DOS at the bottom of the screen, so I think it knows something. Are my linux boxes just being snobbish? Does windows put some trailing : to screw with me? If so, why can't I see it/ get rid of it?
Thanks for the enlightenment,
Pepik

[Ovid]

There are a couple of possibilities. If you transferred this to the Linux box and didn't deal with the \r\n line ending, you should either have a dos2unix utility, or you can use the following one-liner to correct this:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/\r\n$/\n/' somescript.pl

The above will do the conversion. Actually, just stripping the carriage return is probably fine (s/\r//), but if, for some reason, you had a carriage return anywhere else, you might not want to strip those (can't see why you would, though).

To verify that the carriage return is actually there, though (the above is wasted if it's not):

cat -vE somescript.pl

With that cat command, if you see ^M before the final $, then you know you have carriage returns that need to be stripped.

Cheers,
Ovid

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[grep]

inventory was written on a Windows box running cygwin, and I'm modifying and testing it on a Linux laptop

You are correct, I see that problem when the line endings are incorrect for the platform. You need to remove the \r from the line endings in *nix (Win \r\n ends a line - *nix \n ends a line). There are several examples on this site.

The other choice is to trasfer the files via FTP/SFTP/SCP and specifiy them a text/ascii and it will do the line termination conversion for you.



grep

Unix - where you can throw the manual on the keyboard and actually get a command

[extremely]

In vim type :se ff=unix and then save the file.

=) dos endings are going to drive you nuts till you learn to move files with ftp and text mode rather than binary mode.

Or in perl you can fix the file with perl -pi.bak -e 's/\r\n/\n/'

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

[mrbbking]

I agree with grep.
Much detail on this can be found at Odd -w behavior on scripts written on Win32 platform.

[perlplexer]

The problem may be related to the fact that Windows puts \r\n at the end of each line as opposed to \n (on UNIX). See if you have dos2unix on your Linux box (man dos2unix), use it if you do. If not, you can FTP the file to yourself using ASCII mode and that'll take care of it.

--perlplexer

[converter]

I posted an explanation of this behavior at Re: Turning *off* warnings causes the script to fail :( if you're interested.

[pepik_knize]

Monks,
dos2unix did it, and I'm glad to see unix2dos will send it back.
Thanks!

Pepik