BASH Syntax error near unexpected token 'done'

Question

Any idea of what the problem could be?

My code is:

#!/bin/bash
while :
do
echo "Press [CTRL+C] to stop.."
sleep 1
done

Saved it as .sh and ran bash file.sh

CentOS 6 32-bit

What is the issue? First time EVER using BASH, need it for a simple infinite loop on something.

Answer 1

Run cat -v file.sh.

You most likely have a carriage return or no-break space in your file. cat -v will show them as ^M and M-BM- or M- respectively. It will similarly show any other strange characters you might have gotten into your file.

Remove the Windows line breaks with

tr -d '\r' < file.sh > fixedfile.sh

Answer 2

I was getting the same error on Cygwin; I did the following (one of them fixed it):

1. Converted TABS to SPACES
2. ran dos2unix on the .(ba)sh file

Answer 3

What is the error you're getting?

$ bash file.sh
test.sh: line 8: syntax error: unexpected end of file

If you get that error, you may have bad line endings. Unix uses <LF> at the end of the file while Windows uses <CR><LF>. That <CR> character gets interpreted as a character.

You can use od -a test.sh to see the invisible characters in the file.

$ od -a test.sh
0000000    #   !   /   b   i   n   /   b   a   s   h  cr  nl   #  sp  cr
0000020   nl   w   h   i   l   e  sp   :  cr  nl   d   o  cr  nl  sp  sp
0000040   sp  sp   e   c   h   o  sp   "   P   r   e   s   s  sp   [   C
0000060    T   R   L   +   C   ]  sp   t   o  sp   s   t   o   p   "  cr
0000100   nl  sp  sp  sp  sp   s   l   e   e   p  sp   1  cr  nl   d   o
0000120    n   e  cr  nl                                                
0000124

The sp stands for space, the ht stands for tab, the cr stands for <CR> and the nl stands for <LF>. Note that all of the lines end with cr followed by a nl character.

You can also use cat -v test.sh if your cat command takes the -v parameter.

If you have dos2unix on your box, you can use that command to fix your file:

$ dos2unix test.sh

Answer 4

Might help someone else : I encountered the same kind of issues while I had done some "copy-paste" from a side Microsoft Word document, where I took notes, to my shell script(s).

Re-writing, manually, the exact same code in the script just solved this.

It was quite un-understandable at first, I think Word's hidden characters and/or formatting were the issue. Obvious but not see-able ... I lost about one hour on this (I'm no shell expert, as you might guess ...)