a simple case/esac construct exercise fails, why?

Question

This is the BASH script:

#!/bin/bash
read -p "Type in a color name, please: " COLOR
case "$COLOR" in
    green | red | yellow)
    echo -n "nice colors!"
    ;;
    *)
    echo -n "meh..."
    ;;
esac

Once set the x permission to the script for user, I run it but get the following:

[inewton@centos7 LPIC1-exercises]$ ./colors.sh
Type in a color name, please: pink
./colors.sh: line 12: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
'/colors.sh: line 12: `esac
[inewton@centos7 LPIC1-exercises]$

What am I doing wrong? Help me please.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '21 at 11:35

5

'/colors.sh: line 12: `esac

Notice the weird placement of the closing quote at the beginning of the line. That's a sign that there was a carriage return (CR) character after the word esac. Bash treats the CR as part of the word esac␍, so this is not a reserved word, and the actual word esac is missing.

CR characters are part of Windows line endings: a Unix line ending is the LF (line feed) character alone, whereas a Windows line ending is the two-character sequence CR+LF. See #!/bin/bash - no such file or directory for more explanations. The twist here is that your file has mixed line endings: previous lines didn't cause a problem so at least some of them must have Unix line endings.

Remove all carriage returns from your file. Most editors will show them explicitly in a file with mixed line endings.

answered May 17 '21 at 11:35

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

829,060

There is probably a carriage return on that last line only. – Kusalananda May 17 '21 at 11:37
1

@Kusalananda Indeed, although the echo lines could have a CR, and other lines could have a space and a CR with the space getting lost in the copying. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' May 17 '21 at 11:48
It could be so, yes. It seems as if dos2unix handles files that have a mix of DOS and Unix line-endings. – Kusalananda May 17 '21 at 11:50

a simple case/esac construct exercise fails, why?

1 Answers1