Question

I was using a quick and dirty BASH script to automate a CF partitioning process.
This worked well until I wanted to add to it.

Basically, I have a script which partitions a compact flash as such:

CMD=.fdisk
DEV=/dev/sdc

echo "Calculating partition sizes..."
P1SIZE=+1100M
P2SIZE=+1200M

echo "Creating instruction file..."
PT1="n p 1\n $P1SIZE"
PT2="n p 2\n $P2SIZE"
END="a 1 w EOF\n"

[ -e $CMD ] && rm -rf $CMD

for i in $PT1 $PT2 $END; do echo -e $i >> $CMD; done

echo "Creating partitions..."
fdisk $DEV << EOF < $CMD
[ -e $CMD ] && rm -f $CMD

The idea is that in the future the file represented by ‘$CMD’ will be created automatically by an external tool with the proper start and end values. Right now I simply accept the default start and provide a size.

This worked quite well until I wanted to incorporate a few additional steps to my script. But I got into problems when I noticed weird behaviors.

The first is that if I add the code above inside a function, I will keep getting a script error:

line XX: syntax error: unexpected end of file

Also, I realized that any additional code after the ‘fdisk’ command will not execute and the script seems to simply terminate (without errors, $? = 0).

Does anyone know why the function doesn’t work and the script terminates?

Answer 1

You’ve started a heredoc (<< EOF), but you never end it anywhere.