here-document gives unexpected end of file error

Question

I need my script to send an email from terminal  Based on what I ve seen here and many other places online  I formatted it like this    var mail -s   SUBJECT    EMAIL   lt  lt  EOF Here s a line of my message  And here s another line  Last line of the message here  EOF   However  when I run this I get this warning   myfile sh  line x  warning  here-document at line y delimited by end-of-file  wanted  EOF    myfile sh  line x 1  syntax error  unexpected end of file      where line x is the last written line of code in the program  and line y is the line with  var mail in it  I ve tried replacing EOF with other things  ENDOFMESSAGE  FINISH  etc   but to no avail  Nearly everything I ve found online has it done this way  and I m really new at bash so I m having a hard time figuring it out on my own  Could anyone offer any help

User · Accepted Answer

The EOF token must be at the beginning of the line  you can t indent it along with the block of code it goes with   If you write  lt  lt -EOF you may indent it  but it must be indented with Tab characters  not spaces  So it still might not end up even with the block of code   Also make sure you have no whitespace after the EOF token on the line

User · Answer

Please try to remove the preceeding spaces before EOF -   var mail -s   SUBJECT    EMAIL   lt  lt -EOF   Using  lt tab gt  instead of  lt spaces gt  for ident AND using  lt  lt -EOF works fine    The  -  removes the  lt tabs gt   not  lt spaces gt   but at least this works

User · Answer

Note one can also get this error if you do this   while read line  do   echo  line done  lt  lt  somefile   Because  lt  lt  somefile should read  lt  somefile in this case

User · Answer

Along with the other answers mentioned by Barmar and Joni  I ve noticed that I sometimes have to leave a blank line before and after my EOF when using  lt  lt -EOF

User · Answer

When I want to have docstrings for my bash functions  I use a solution similar to the suggestion of user12205 in a duplicate of this question  See how I define USAGE for a solution that   auto-formats well for me in my IDE of choice  sublime  is multi-line can use spaces or tabs as indentation preserves indentations within the comment   function foo         Docstring     read -r -d    USAGE  lt  lt      END            This method prints foo to the terminal                      Enter  foo -h  to see the docstring                 It has indentations and multiple lines                      Change the delimiter if you need hashtag for some reason            This can include    and   and eval  but won t be evaluated     END       if    quot  1 quot     quot -h quot        then         echo  quot  USAGE quot    cut -d  quot   quot  -f 2   cut -c 2-         return     fi      echo  quot foo quot     So foo -h yields  This method prints foo to the terminal   Enter  foo -h  to see the docstring       It has indentations and multiple lines   Change the delimiter if you need hashtag for some reason  This can include    and   and eval  but won t be evaluated  Explanation cut -d  quot   quot  -f 2  Retrieve the second portion of the   delimited lines    Think a csv with  quot   quot  as the delimiter  empty first column   cut -c 2-  Retrieve the 2nd to end character of the resultant string Also note that if    quot  1 quot     quot -h quot    evaluates as False if there is no first argument  w o error  since it becomes an empty string

User · Answer

The line that starts or ends the here-doc probably has some non-printable or whitespace characters  for example  carriage return  which means that the second  EOF  does not match the first  and doesn t end the here-doc like it should  This is a very common error  and difficult to detect with just a text editor  You can make non-printable characters visible for example with cat   cat -A myfile sh   Once you see the output from cat -A the solution will be obvious  remove the offending characters

User · Answer

Here is a flexible way to do deal with multiple indented lines without using heredoc     echo  Hello     sed -e  s   s      lt   lt  echo       Some indented text here      Some indented text here         if    true     then     sed -e  s   s  4 4       lt   lt  echo         Some indented text here          Some extra indented text here        Some indented text here           fi   Some notes on this solution    if the content is expected to have simple quotes  either escape them using   or replace the string delimiters with double quotes  In the latter case  be careful that construction like   command  will be interpreted  If the string contains both simple and double quotes  you ll have to escape at least of kind  the given example print a trailing empty line  there are numerous way to get rid of it  not included here to keep the proposal to a minimum clutter the flexibility comes from the ease with which you can control how much leading space should stay or go  provided that you know some sed REGEXP of course

[bash] here-document gives 'unexpected end of file' error

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