scp and line break in a shell script

Question

I have an .sh file, containing a command, which copies a file from remote server to a particular directory, preserving original filename, and the second line is just a comment:

scp (host):~/filename.sql ~/
# just a comment

I name the script dbcopy.sh, put it in my home directory and run it from console like:

sh ~/dbcopy.sh

The problem is because of a line break following the scp command, the file being copied has a name consisting of one character (in the listing below it is displayed as a question mark) instead of an original name!

console> ls -l ~
...
-rw-rw-r--  1 (user)  (group)   158327960 26 oct 17:28 ?

If I remove any line breaks after the scp command everything works as expected.

How should I handle this situation?

Answer 1

The issue was line ending delimiter in my editor: it used \r\n sequence instead of just \n. Thus the last argument of scp command was not just ~/ as it displays. It was actually ~/\r.

So instead of passing a directory name with a slash on end (which would instruct the command to copy a file into that directory preserving a file's name - the behaviour I expected), some more was added after the slash - an \r character, which led to the command accepting it as a new name for the file being copied.

Answer 2

You did not include the script or info on how you are running the script. I don't know if you are calling it from a cronjob or from a different user.

That said, the following very basic test script (t.sh) works perfectly for me on FreeBSD.

#!/bin/sh
echo "Pre test"
scp spider.goo:~/tColor.c ~/
echo "Post test"

Call like so:

sh ./t.sh

With the following output:

Pre test
Password for tigger@spider:
tColor.c       100% 1805     1.8KB/s   00:00    
Post test