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I'm working my way through William Shotts Jr.'s great The Linux Command Line on my Mac OSX 10.7.5 system. 90% of the linux that Shotts covers is close enough to Darwin that I can figure out or GTEM to figure out what's going on. I've made it to chapter 27 on "Writing Shell Scripts" and am getting hung up creating "here files" within a function.

I get an syntax error: unexpected end of file error when I include the following function:

report_uptime () {
  cat <<- _EOF_
    <H2>System Uptime</H2>
    <PRE>$(uptime)</PRE>
    _EOF_
  return
}

The error goes away if I use the following function placeholder:

report_uptime () {
  return
}

Also, elsewhere in the script, outside of a function I use the cat << _EOF_ format to create a "here file" with no trouble:

cat << _EOF_
<HTML>
      <HEAD>
            <TITLE>$TITLE</TITLE>
      </HEAD>
      <BODY>
            <H1>$TITLE</H1>
            <P>$TIME_STAMP</P>
            $(report_uptime)
            $(report_disk_space)
            $(report_home_space)
      </BODY>
</HTML>
_EOF_

If anyone has any idea what I'm doing wrong I would be grateful!

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2  
The EOF token must be the first thing on the line, without any leading white spaces. – Ярослав Рахматуллин Nov 24 '12 at 19:58
That worked for me, @Ярослав_Рахматуллин. I don't think that the [-] is an option for Darwin's here files. cat << _EOF_ not cat <<- _EOF_ – BenU Nov 24 '12 at 20:32
that's a shame. – Ярослав Рахматуллин Nov 24 '12 at 22:07

1 Answer

up vote 2 down vote accepted

If the redirection operator is ‘<<-’, then all leading tab characters are stripped from input lines and the line containing delimiter. This allows here-documents within shell scripts to be indented in a natural fashion.

If that does not work as documented, try moving the EOF token to the very beginning of the line (remove all white spaces).

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This should work regardless of the system, unless the bash version is broken on your system. – Ярослав Рахматуллин Nov 24 '12 at 20:15
Thanks @Ярослав_Рахматуллин Though adding the - to << didn't solve my problem, removing the whitespace before the _EOF_ did. Perhaps "here documents" with cat << works in Darwin but not cat <<-. It's a shame since <<- is so useful. Move your comment into your answer and I will accept it. Addendum: bash may in fact be broken. Possibly broken by me, possibly Mac's Darwin's limitations... – BenU Nov 24 '12 at 20:17
1  
@BenU, note that the man page is very specific here: tab characters not whitespace – glenn jackman Nov 25 '12 at 4:41
@glennjackman Using spaces instead of tabs could indeed be the source of my problem. I've arranged my text editor to use two spaces instead of tab by default. Thanks! – BenU Nov 25 '12 at 4:47

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