Yes: use vi! ;-))

Seriously: look carefully at your code. You see that funny characters at the end:

Code:

           these ones
           |
           v
#!/bin/bash^M$
echo -e "enter the name of the file : \c"^M$

They are in fact Windows way of saying "the line ends here". You see, when you look at how a file is stored physically on the disk the characters are ordered in one long line of ascending storage addresses, not in an array, like when you look at it in an editor. To start a new line at a certain point when displaying it the operating system must have some means to tell that to the displaying program.

This - in DOS and all its descendants, Windows is one of them - is the sequence "<CR><LF>": "carriage return, linefeed" (if you wonder why: think of a mechanical typewriter and how the carriage is first moved back to the left again, then the barrel is rotated so that the next line is moved under the types). In all the UNIX variants (including Linux) this is not the case: in UNIX it is the <NL> (newline) character, which does the same. The reason is: printers worked like typewriters back in the days, but UNIX had "printer filters" - programs which took files sent to the printer and added whatver was necessary to print it properly. They would take a newline character and if the printer needed a CR/LF sequence they would insert that instead. DOS had no such thing as a printer filter and therefore its inventors made the files in a format that already fit most printers so that they didn't need the post-processing and still got a properly printed result.

When you now transfer a text file from UNIX to Windows or vice versa you need to change these line-end markers because the respective other OS will be confused if they are in the wrong format. You may remember FTP programs and their distinction between ASCII mode and "binary mode" - that was nothing else than the FTP program doing exactly this translation (ASCII) or not (binary). When you write your code in Visual Studio (or any other editor) in WIndows and then transfer it to UNIX you must do this translation otherwise UNIX will be confused. If you create code in vi and transfer it to Windows you need to to the same or Windows will think there is just one long line that never ends - look at such a transferred file in notepad.exe and you will see what i mean.

The "^M" is in fact a <CTRL>-<M> character, which is the same as pressing <ENTER>. You can produce it yourself: enter vi, enter insert mode ("i"), press <CTRL>-<V> to enter the next charcter verbose and then press <ENTER> - a "^M" should appear.

To get rid of DOS-style end-of-lines in UNIX you can run the following (the "^M" is such a <ENTER>-character):

Code:

sed 's/^M$//' /path/to/dosstyle.file > /path/to/unixstyle.file

Or, if your system has them, you can use the dos2unix and unix2dos programs, which do the translating too.

I hope this helps.

bakunin