UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello All,

i have a really strange copy paste problem. When I write some loops in an editor for example:

Code:

for j in 1 2 3
do
  echo "$j"
done

and I want to paste it to the shell, the result in the shell is:

Code:

for j in 1 2 3; do e;

other commands work fine and if a copy paste the loop like this:

Code:

for j in 1 2 3; do echo "$j"; done

it works to. I probably disabled line breaks somehow by accident?

Any hints would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks Johannes

What OS, what editor, which version of BASH, exactly how are you copying and pasting....

Hi,
thanks for your reply:

Bash-Version:

Code:

/bin/bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.1.5(1)-release (i486-pc-linux-gnu)

OS: Lubunut 9.10

Editor: gedit 2.30.3

Copy/paste method: I used the middle mouse button and also to cut: crtl+c and to paste ctrl+shift+v

I tried the following again:

Code:

	for j in 1 3 5
	do
		echo $j
	done

This worked.

Then I tried:

Code:

for i in 1 2 3
do
	for j in 1 3 5
	do
		echo $i
		echo $j
	done
done

This didn't work and I got the same error as described above.

And afterwards the first (unnested) loop didn't work either.

Thanks for your help J

ok - this threw me.. got someone local with same setup to test an we saw no issues...

however, a bit of poking about suggests that you are using tabs, so when you copy/paste into the shell it's trying to do a bash tab completion, and barfing your input...

try changing your leading tabs ( in fact any tabs in your code) to spaces and let me know if this solves the issue....

Cheers

You were absolutely right!

Exchanging tabs with spaces solved the problem.

Thanks a lot for that