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 a

Answer 1

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 ...)

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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' < yourscript.sh > newscript.sh

This removes any CR characters from the file.

Answer 4

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)

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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