Question

I have a bash script and I want to use ncftp to do something. if I have this:

#!/bin/sh
HOST='my_IP_FTP_HOST'
USER='username'
PASSWD='password'
ncftp -u $USER -p $PASSWD $HOST <<END_SCRIPT
pwd 
quit
END_SCRIPT

I get this error:

Syntax error in parameters or arguments

I don’t understand why.
If I give it only the value and not the variables it works…

if I launch

$ sh -x script.sh

I get:

+ HOST=$'xxx.x.xx.xx\r'
+ USER=$'username\r'
+ PASSWD=$'password\r'
+ ncftp -u $'username\r' -p $'password\r' $'xxx.x.xx.xx\r'
NcFTP 3.2.1 (Jul 29, 2007) by Mike Gleason (http://www.NcFTP.com/contact/).
Welcome to FTP server
Syntax error in parameters or arguments

hmmm…. \r creates problems sure.

Answer 1

Are you editing this file on Microsoft Windows? It doesn’t works because the original file uses Windows carriage returns, which are passed to variables and then to ncftp, which then halts.

Fix it by using another text editor, or by using dos2unix. Ideally you’d first use dos2unix once and then change the text editor.

Alternatively (but really, really not recommended) you could just parse the variables and remove the extra \r, like below, especially when the problem arises at some input reading, which doesn’t seems to be the case here.

HOST=${HOST%\\r}
USER=${USER%\\r}
PASSWD=${PASSWD%\\r}

Take care when copying text from Windows, or when editing without appropriate software.