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Here's the deal. I've got cygwin installed in Win7 envionment. This is the sequence of things I would do in a command line and everything works,

File mpc.exe is a 64-bit executable created by Intel Fortran Compiler

cp ./dir1/dir2/mpc.exe ./mpc.exe
./mpc.exe arg1 arg2

everything is fine

Want to create a script for that. The reason is I will want to execute the code for various values of arg2. file "script_mpc.sh" contains following,

#!/bin/sh
cp ./dir1/dir2/mpc.exe ./mpc.exe
./mpc.exe arg1 arg2
wait
return_val=$?
[ $retval -eq 0 ] && echo "successfully executed "

Now back at the command line,

$>chmod +x script_mpc.sh
$>./script_mpc.sh

error:

./script_mpc.sh: line 2: ./mpc.exe: No such file or directory

A very fresh beginner. Learning shell commands and scripting on the go. Please help.

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  • If you really expect this to be a bash script, you need #!/bin/bash at the top, not #!/bin/sh But I don't know if that's your problem, as your files are named with .sh so maybe you don't mean bash in the question. Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 19:22
  • Did script successfuly copy mpc.exe fo current directory? Try to specify the full path to source mpc.exe in cp command. Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 19:30
  • @Almo: Thanks for replying. I experimented with bash instead of sh at the header. Doesn't make much of a difference there. Same errors. Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 19:37
  • @rush: I have every reasons to believe the executable was properly copied. The files at destination and source have the same size (i.e. 7053 KB to be precises). However, there's a weird thing going on for sure. Once the copy process is complete, the windows folder does show the following marker for the file: " mpc.exe * ". In detail, the executable name is followed by a white space and a what looks like a floating 'black dot'. I don't know how to not have these characters at the end. They're there regardless of what extension I use, including if I do not specify any extension at all. Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 19:43
  • However, those extraneous characters at the end, 'white space+floating black dot' doesn't show if the same command, 'cp ./dir1/dir2/mpc.exe ./mpc.exe' is typed at the command line. Commented Jul 20, 2012 at 19:44

1 Answer 1

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You're on Cygwin.

I'll bet that this line:

cp ./dir1/dir2/mpc.exe ./mpc.exe

has a Windows-style CR-LF line ending. The shell (either sh or bash) interprets the CR as part of the filename, so it copies the file to "./mpc.exe\r".

Filter the script through dos2unix. Be sure to read the man page first; unlike most text filters, it normally overwrites the input file.

Background:

Unix uses a single ASCII LF character to mark the end of a line in a text file. Windows uses a CR-LF pair. Cygwin is a Unix-like emulation layer on top of Windows, so it tends to be a rich source of problems with conflicting end-of-line representations.

Unix shells, in particular, typically don't recognize the CR as part of an end-of-line indicator; instead, they treat it as just another character -- one that tends to be invisible, depending on how you look at the file.

You probably have a mixture of LF and CR-LF line endings. If it used CR-LF endings consistently, then the #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash line wouldn't be recognized.

If possible, use only Unix-style editors (vim, emacs, nano, or whatever you prefer) to edit shell scripts. If you create a script using, say, Notepad or Wordpad, you're likely to run into this kind of problem.

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2 Comments

I think you hit the bull's eye in there. I did use a windows based text editor to create the script. Being a starter, I thought I'd take the easy way out for now until I've mastered some of these subtle formats for linux systems. I think that should work. Thanks again.
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