Question

Can anyone tell me what is wrong with this code? It is supposed to be a help me do a speed test on a remote server. I get the following error when trying to execute it via SSH using PUTTY:
syntax error: unexpected end of file

    ssh_server=$1
    test_file=".scp-test-file"
    # Optional: user specified test file size in kBs
    if test -z "$2"
    then
        # default size is 10kB ~ 10mB
        test_size="10000"
    else
        test_size=$2
    fi
    # generate a 10000kB file of all zeros
    echo "Generating $test_size kB test file..."
    `dd if=/dev/zero of=$test_file bs=$(echo "$test_size*1024" | bc) \
        count=1 &> /dev/null`
    # upload test
    echo "Testing upload to $ssh_server..."
    up_speed=`scp -v $test_file $ssh_server:$test_file 2>&1 | \
        grep "Bytes per second" | \
        sed "s/^[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\).*$/\1/g"`
    up_speed=`echo "($up_speed*0.0009765625*100.0+0.5)/1*0.01" | bc`
    # download test
    echo "Testing download to $ssh_server..."
    down_speed=`scp -v $ssh_server:$test_file $test_file 2>&1 | \
        grep "Bytes per second" | \
        sed "s/^[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\).*$/\2/g"`
    down_speed=`echo "($down_speed*0.0009765625*100.0+0.5)/1*0.01" | bc`
    # clean up
    echo "Removing test file on $ssh_server..."
    `ssh $ssh_server "rm $test_file"`
    echo "Removing test file locally..."
    `rm $test_file`
    # print result
    echo ""
    echo "Upload speed:   $up_speed kB/s"
    echo "Download speed: $down_speed kB/s"

Any Ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

Remove the backticks from around those commands that are not part of an assignment to a variable.

Also, make sure there are no tabs, spaces or carriage returns after the line-continuation backslashes (and no carriage returns at all in the file).

Instead of multiplying by the ugly “0.0009765625”, divide by 2^17 or 131072.

Why are you dividing by 1? Just omit that. Divide by 100 instead of multiplying by 0.01.

Even though it’s unlikely that the variables’ contents contain whitespace, you should make it a habit to always quote variables when they are expanded.

#!/bin/bash
ssh_server=$1
test_file=".scp-test-file"
# Optional: user specified test file size in kBs
if test -z "$2"
then
    # default size is 10mB
    test_size="10000"
else
    test_size=$2
fi
# generate a file of all zeros
echo "Generating $test_size kB test file..."
dd if=/dev/zero of="$test_file" bs=$(echo "$test_size*1024" | bc) \
    count=1 &> /dev/null
# upload test
echo "Testing upload to $ssh_server..."
up_speed=$(scp -v "$test_file" "$ssh_server:$test_file" 2>&1 | \
    sed -n '/Bytes per second/s/^[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\).*$/\1/p')
up_speed=$(echo "scale = 2; $up_speed / 131072 * 100.0" | bc -l)
# download test
echo "Testing download to $ssh_server..."
down_speed=$(scp -v "$ssh_server:$test_file" "$test_file" 2>&1 | \
    sed -n '/Bytes per second/s/^[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\)[^0-9]*\([0-9.]*\).*$/\2/p')
down_speed=$(echo "scale = 2; $down_speed / 131072 * 100.0" | bc -l)
# clean up
echo "Removing test file on $ssh_server..."
ssh $ssh_server "rm '$test_file'"
echo "Removing test file locally..."
rm "$test_file"
# print result
echo
echo "Upload speed:   $up_speed kB/s"
echo "Download speed: $down_speed kB/s"