Bash script appending ^M to filename

Question

In one of my bash scripts, I am creating a file by repeatedly using echo with output redirection to append to the file. The resulting file, however, is not named properly, but always has an unprintable ^M character appended to the end. Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? The following simple script demonstrates the problem:

#!/bin/bash
# Should create 'concat.txt' instead creates 'concat.txt^M'
outfile="concat.txt"
echo "'"$outfile"'"
for item in "Able" "Baker" "Charlie"; do
    echo $item >> $outfile
done

System: Ubuntu 9.04 (x64)

Answer 1

I would suspect that you edited the file somewhere that added DOS-style line endings. Run your file through dos2unix to get rid of them.

dos2unix yourscriptfile

Answer 2

^M is what you would see at the end of every line if you set the line ending to unix mode when the file was written initially in dos mode where the line endings are \r\n

So, while you see

echo $item >> $outfile

unix sees:

echo $item >> $outfile^M

First,

:set ff=unix

Then:

:%s/\r//

to remove the ^M

EDIT

For some silly reason I assumed you're using vim. Maybe because it's the only editor that I've seen show the \r as ^M. Anyway, do what Dennis Williamson said, use the dos2unix tool.