Why do I have strange problems with text-files / scripts copied from other computers?

One reason is that copy-and-paste sometimes doesn't work. Rich text files and PDF's often replace symbols like quotes and white space with different symbols to improve readability, and copying from sources like these is generally not a good idea.

Another possible reason is that lines of text files are terminated differently on UNIX/Windows/MAC. Read on for information on how to solve this:

This might happen because your file was created, for instance, on a Windows computer and later copied to UPPMAX Linux machines. Text files have different line terminations on for instance Windows and Linux/Unix. If this is an ordinary textfile you can test this by using the "file" command, like this:

$ file myfile
myfile: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

CRLF terminators tells you that each line of the file is ended by both a carriage-return and a line-feed, as on Windows. On all UPPMAX systems, the file can simply be converted to UNIX style text files using the "dos2unix" command:

$ dos2unix myfile
dos2unix: converting file myfile to UNIX format ...

Checking the file again with the "file" command reveals that it now has ordinary UNIX line terminators (only LF):

$ file myfile
myfile: ASCII text

Similarly, a file from a Mac can be converted using the "mac2unix" command.

If a shell script is behaving strangely, it can be due to the same problem. Trying to execute a program where the end of line marker is wrong might result in an error message such as the one below:

$ cat myscript.sh
#!/bin/sh
./program
$ ./myscript.sh
: No such file or directory

The "file" command does not work in this case as it simply tells us that the script is a "Bourne shell script text executable". Opening the script using "vi" shows at the bottom of the screen "myscript.sh" [dos] 2L, 22C. The "[dos]" is a sure marker of the same problem. Opening the same file in emacs reveals the same thing (-uu-(DOS)---F1 myscript.sh). Convert the script to unix-format using the "dos2unix" command as described above. An alternative is to copy the file and use the "dos2unix" command on the copy and compare the file sizes using "ls -l":

$ ls -l testme.sh
rwxr-xr-x  1 daniels uppmax_staff 22 Dec 15 10:53 testme.sh
$ dos2unix testme.sh
dos2unix: converting file testme.sh to UNIX format ...
$ ls -l testme.sh
-rwxr-xr-x  1 daniels uppmax_staff 20 Dec 15 10:54 testme.sh

Note that the file size went from 22 bytes to 20, reflecting that the two CR bytes at the (almost) end of the line were removed.

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