BASH Syntax error near unexpected token done

Question

Any idea of what the problem could be   My code is      bin bash while   do echo  Press  CTRL C  to stop    sleep 1 done   Saved it as  sh and ran bash file sh  CentOS 6 32-bit  What is the issue  First time EVER using BASH  need it for a simple infinite loop on something

User · Answer

Had similar problems just now and these are two separate instances and solutions that worked for me:

Case 1. Basically, had a space after the last command within my newline-separated for-loop, eg. (imagining that | here represents the carat in a text editor showing where you are writing), this is what I saw when clicking around the end of the line of the last command in the loop:

for f in $pathToFiles
do
   $stuff |
done

Notice the space before before the carat (so far as I know, this is something cat has no option do display visually (one way you could test is with something like od -bc yourscript.sh)). Changing the code to

for f in $pathToFiles
do
   $stuff| <--- notice the carat shows no ending space before the newline
done

fixed the problem.

Case 2. Was using a pseudo try-catch block for the for-loop (see https://stackoverflow.com/a/22010339/8236733) like

{
for f in $pathToFiles
do
   { $stuff } || { echo "Failed to complete stuff"; exit 255; }
done
} || { echo "Failed to complete loop"; exit 255; }

and apparently bash did not like the nested {}s. Changing to

{
for f in $pathToFiles
do
   $stuff
done
} || { echo "Failed to complete loop"; exit 255; }

fixed the problem in this case. If anyone can further explain either of these cases, please let me know more about them in the comments.

User · Answer

I was getting the same error on Cygwin  I did the following  one of them fixed it     Converted TABS to SPACES ran dos2unix on the   ba sh file

User · Answer

Might help someone else   I encountered the same kind of issues while I had done some  copy-paste  from a side Microsoft Word document  where I took notes  to my shell script s    Re-writing  manually  the exact same code in the script just solved this   It was quite un-understandable at first  I think Word s hidden characters and or formatting were the issue  Obvious but not see-able     I lost about one hour on this  I m no shell expert  as you might guess

User · Answer

Edit your code in any linux environment then you won t face this problem  If edit in windows  notepad any space take it as  M

User · Answer

I had same problem  but solved   I removed the following line in  bashrc  alias do  docker exe    this line caused the problem   I use WSL windows subsystem for linux

User · Answer

I have exactly the same issue as above  and took me the whole day to discover that it doesn t like my newline approach  Instead I reused the same code with semi-colon approach instead  For example my initial code using the newline  which threw the same error as yours    Y 1 while test   Y  -le  20  do         echo  Number  Y          Y   Y 1  done   And using code with semicolon approach with worked wonder   Y 1   while test   Y  -le  20   do echo  Number  Y   Y   Y 1    done   I notice the same problem occurs for other commands as well using the newline approach  so I think I am gonna stick to using semicolon for my future code

User · Answer

Sometimes this error happens because of unexpected CR characters in file  usually because the file was generated on a Windows system which uses CR line endings  You can fix this by running os2unix or tr  for example      tr -d   015   lt  yourscript sh   newscript sh   This removes any CR characters from the file

User · Answer

Open new file named foobar  nano -w foobar   Input script      bin bash  while   0   0    do    echo  Press  CTRL C  to stop       sleep 1  done    Exit and save  CTRL X then Y and Enter  Set script executable and run  chmod  x foobar   foobar

User · Answer

Run cat -v file sh    You most likely have a carriage return or no-break space in your file  cat -v will show them as  M and M-BM- or M- respectively  It will similarly show any other strange characters you might have gotten into your file   Remove the Windows line breaks with   tr -d   r   lt  file sh  gt  fixedfile sh

User · Answer

What is the error you re getting     bash file sh test sh  line 8  syntax error  unexpected end of file   If you get that error  you may have bad line endings  Unix uses  lt LF gt  at the end of the file while Windows uses  lt CR gt  lt LF gt   That  lt CR gt  character gets interpreted as a character   You can use od -a test sh to see the invisible characters in the file     od -a test sh 0000000                b   i   n       b   a   s   h  cr  nl      sp  cr 0000020   nl   w   h   i   l   e  sp      cr  nl   d   o  cr  nl  sp  sp 0000040   sp  sp   e   c   h   o  sp       P   r   e   s   s  sp       C 0000060    T   R   L       C      sp   t   o  sp   s   t   o   p      cr 0000100   nl  sp  sp  sp  sp   s   l   e   e   p  sp   1  cr  nl   d   o 0000120    n   e  cr  nl                                                 0000124   The sp stands for space  the ht stands for tab  the cr stands for  lt CR gt  and the nl stands for  lt LF gt   Note that all of the lines end with cr followed by a nl character    You can also use cat -v test sh if your cat command takes the -v parameter   If you have dos2unix on your box  you can use that command to fix your file     dos2unix test sh

User · Answer

In my case  what was causing the problem was an if else statement  After re-writing the conditions  the error  near done  got away

User · Answer

There s a way you can get this problem without having mixed newline problems  at least  in my shell  which is GNU bash v4 3 30       bin bash   foo sh  function foo         echo  I am quoting a thing   1  inside a function      while     input      y     do     read -p  Hit  y  to continue    -n 1 input     echo done  foo  What could possibly go wrong         foo sh   foo sh  line 11  syntax error near unexpected token  done    foo sh  line 11   done    This is because bash expands backticks inside double-quoted strings  see the bash manual on quoting and command substitution   and before finding a matching backtick  will interpret any additional double quotes as part of the command substitution     echo  Command substitution happens inside double-quoted strings   ls   Command substitution happens inside double-quoted strings  foo sh   echo    even with double quotes   grep -E   foo wrong  foo sh     even with double quotes  foo  What could possibly go wrong     You can get around this by escaping the backticks in your string with a backslash  or by using a single-quoted string   I m not really sure why this only gives the one error message  but I think it has to do with the function definition      bin bash   a sh  function a         echo  Thing s  quoted     a while true  do     echo  Other  quote   done        bin bash   b sh  echo  Thing s  quoted   while true  do     echo  Other  quote   done       a sh   a sh  line 10  syntax error near unexpected token  done    a sh  line 10   done      b sh   b sh  command substitution  line 6  unexpected EOF while looking for matching       b sh  command substitution  line 9  syntax error  unexpected end of file Thing s quote    b sh  line 7  syntax error near unexpected token  done    b sh  line 7   done

[bash] BASH Syntax error near unexpected token 'done'

Examples related to bash