bash - Why is a shell script giving syntax errors when the same code works elsewhere?

Question

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Answer 1

TL;DR: Your script has Windows style CRLF line endings, aka .

Convert to Unix style by deleting the carriage returns.

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How do I check if my script has carriage returns?

They're detectable as ^M in the output of cat -v yourscript:

$ cat -v myscript
if true^M
then^M
  true^M
...

How do I remove them?

Set your editor to save the file with Unix line endings, aka "line terminators" or "end-of-line characters", and resave it.

You can also remove them from a command line with dos2unix yourscript or cat yourscript | tr -d ' ' > fixedscript.

Why do carriage returns cause syntax errors?

The carriage return character is just another character to bash. then is not the same as then , so bash doesn't recognize it as a keyword and assumes it's a command. It then keeps looking for a then and fails

If there happens to be a trailing space after then, you get a similar problem for fi.