shell : syntax error near unexpected token `fi'

Question

Getting syntax error near unexpected token `fi' while executing below code. below is the output:-

: command not founde 2: 
: command not founde 7: 
run_billing.sh: line 22: syntax error near unexpected token `fi'
'un_billing.sh: line 22: `fi

The script is:

#!/bin/sh

#
# main
#
NARGS=$#

if [ $NARGS -lt 2 ]
then
        echo "$PRG_NAME: error: incorrect number of arguments ($NARGS)";
        echo "Usage: $PRG_NAME [Time]";
    echo "Time format - pin_virtual_time format. e.g:- 062000002015.00";
    echo "Example: sh run_billing.sh 062000002015.00";
        exit 1
fi

if [ $NARGS -eq 2 ]
then
        echo "Run Billing script - pin_bill_day";
        pin_virtual_time -m2 $1;
        pin_bill_day;
fi

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

Your line endings are screwed up, each line is terminated by a CR/LF rather than just an LF.

If you do something like od -c run_billing.sh, you'll see them there as \r characters as per my test script (the ^M characters are CR):

if [[ 1 -eq 1 ]]^M
then^M
    echo x is 1^M
fi^M
^M

0000000   i   f       [   [       1       -   e   q       1       ]   ]
0000020  \r  \n   t   h   e   n  \r  \n  \t   e   c   h   o       x
0000040   i   s       1  \r  \n   f   i  \r  \n  \r  \n
0000054

And, when that file is run, we see a similar issue.

That's why you're getting the weird error output, because the CR is moving the cursor to the start of the line before continuing the message, overwriting some of what it's already output.

For example, lines 2 and 7 of your script (the supposedly blank lines) contain a single CR character which is interpreted as a command which doesn't exist. So, for line 2, you see (superimposed):

run_billing.sh: line 2:<CR>
: command not found
=========================== giving:
: command not founde 2:

exactly what you see.

You need to modify the file to remove those CR characters, a couple of ways of doing that are given in this excellent answer.

Used the suggested commands and it did not work. Re-wrote the code in a vi editor rather than notepad. — Bharti, Mar 24 '15 at 09:28
'Did not work' is not that helpful, but you probably should be using a decent editor anyway, notepad is fine for simple things but hardly conducive to making unix style files. — paxdiablo, Mar 24 '15 at 10:44

shell : syntax error near unexpected token `fi'

1 Answers1