Question

Basically I have a list of environmental variables that I need to set from an external file. Here’s what i’m trying to do…

file: /usr/local/env

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-xxxxx.pem
export EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-xxxxx.pem
export EC2_URL=https://ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
export EC2_HOME=/opt/aws/apitools/ec2
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jre

file: /usr/local/test.sh

source /usr/local/env
ec2-describe-instances

When i run /usr/local/test.sh i get /bin/ec2-cmd: No such file or directorybe-instances: line 11: /opt/aws/apitools/ec2

So i check the variables and notice that when:

[root@ip-10-244-17-106 ~]# set | grep EC2
EC2_AMITOOL_HOME=/opt/aws/amitools/ec2
EC2_CERT=$'~/.ec2/cert-xxxxx.pem\r'
EC2_HOME=$'/opt/aws/apitools/ec2\r'
EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=$'~/.ec2/pk-xxxxx.pem\r'

and when i run:

[root@ip-10-244-17-106 ~]# env | grep EC2
EC2_HOME=/opt/aws/apitools/ec2
EC2_URL=https://ec2.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-xxxxx.pem
EC2_CERT=~/.ec2/cert-xxxxx.pem

Why does source wrap $'<variable>\r’ around all my values? I think this is why i’m getting the error. Anyone have any help?

Answer 1

Unix terminates a line with a Line Feed character, frequently described with the C escaping convention as \n. Windows terminates a line with both a Carriage Return and a Line Feed character, or \r\n. So the actual first line in your sourced file is

export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=~/.ec2/pk-xxxxx.pem\r\n

Unix knows to recognize the \n as the end-of-line, but thinks that the \r is just more of the text from that line.

You can strip that with

dos2unix /usr/local/env

Also, some text editors on Windows also offer the option to save with \n line termination.