UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,
I am writing a bash script and it seems I can't get a simple conditional loop to work. Can someone please let me know why this does not work?

#!/bin/sh
echo " "
echo "Searching other files..."
#grep -l $0 testOutput_works.txt
for x in `cat acct.txt` ; do
echo $x
done

The acct.txt is just a simple file containing:
1
2
3
4
5

This is the error message I get:

Searching other files...
searchOtherFiles.sh: line 5: syntax error near unexpected token `$'do\r''
'earchOtherFiles.sh: line 5: `for x in `cat acct.txt` ; do

Is this an issue with Cygwin or the script? I can't get this script to run successfully. I have the latest version of Cygwin.

Thanks in advance for everyone's help!
-SSims

Works fine for me. Looks like you may have some hidden character in the file.
Do a hex or octal dump of the file to see if this is the case.

Seeing as you are using cygwin, are you using files which have CR/LF line terminators instead of the UNIX standard of LF?

If you open the file using notepad.exe and the file looks "right" then the file has CR/LF not LF.

Oh wow, I was using TextPad. Is there a Windows Editor I can use instead? I'm not ready to start learning an editor.

Thanks for the feedback!

A tool called dos2unix (or dos2ux) may be available for you to use to convert DOS newlines to UNIX (ie. strip off the extra \r).

dos2unix will works great! Thanks prowla.