Problem with initialization environment files

Question

I'm trying to get a .profile file to work in my login environment, but it just doesn't want to cooperate. I get errors on just about everything. In fact, the only thing I've been able to get to work is the echo command. It doesn't matter whether or not I use fully qualified paths for the commands or not. Here's a short list of some of the problems.
1. Blank lines generate the following error...
: command not found
2. pwd command generates the following error...
: command not found
3. /bin/ls command generates the following error...
: No such file or directory
4. Echoing the PATH environment variable actually works...
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin
BTW, these commands work just fine from the command line. But if I manually run .profile, or have it run automatically when I launch a terminal window, these errors appear. I'm very familiar with command line interfaces as I've used a multitude of shells over the years in both Solaris and Linux environments. I just don't get what's going on with the Mac. Searching with Google has also drawn a blank, so far. I'm hoping someone has a simple answer for this.

Answer 1

First, by any chance did your .profile get transferred to your Mac via a Windows system so that it is now <CR><LF> terminated. That will mess up just about every Unix shell
Here are the steps I used to initially get my environment files over to the Mac.
1. Created a tar file on a linux platform with my pre-existing environment files.
2. Tar file was compressed with gzip.
3. Compressed tar file was then burned to CD.
4. CD loaded onto a Windows platform.
5. From Windows platform, tried to email tar file to myself but it was too big to send.
6. From Windows used WinZip to uncompress and open the tar file.
7. Extracted the contents to a folder.
8. Removed unnecessary files from folder to make result smaller. Also split contents of folder into multiple folders.
9. Used WinZip to zip new folders containing necessary files into multiple zip files.
10. Emailed zipped files to my home email account.
11. Opened email from Mac and downloaded zip files.
12. From a terminal window unzipped files using /usr/bin/unzip.
13. Copied environment files to home directory with a cp –pr command.
14. Disabled all environment files (by adding different file extensions) so I could begin experimenting with what I needed to change.
15. Started with the .profile file by commenting out most of the file and leaving just a few commands. This is when my problems began. BTW, I used xemacs to edit the file. Xemacs was download and installed via Macports a while back in preparation for creating a development environment for myself. Getting my login environment going was my next step in the process.
16. Since I couldn't get it to work, I then put nothing but some simple shell commands in the .profile to see what would happen. Commands like pwd, ls, and echo. And as I explained in the original post, the only thing that worked was the echo command.
Looking at the preceding steps, the files were never opened on the Windows platform… is it possible that the WinZip steps caused <CR><LF> characters to appear somehow? Or, is it possible that xemacs messed up my file? I use emacs and xemacs all the time on linux and solaris systems with no such problems. Actually, at one point in my messing with the .profile file, in frustration, I decided to open it with vi. I hate vi, but know just enough to be dangerous. What I did was to remove a blank line (remember, blank lines are generating errors too) and insert another one. I figured vi is about as basic and primitive an editor as you can get. So, if any funny control characters are present, that should at least alleviate the problem. Unfortunately, even that still generated the same error.
Have you tried a simplified .profile?
Yes. See #16 above.
Do you have more than one shell initialization file. Bash will look for
.bash_profile
.bash_login
.profile
in that order and use the first one it finds, then stop looking. If you any of the 2 earlier initialization files, bash will not bother looking at your .profile
No, I do not have more than one initialization file... at the moment. And yes, I know what bash looks for, and in what order. At the moment I am only using a .profile just to see if I can get things working. See #14 and #15 above.
I am assuming your shell is 'bash', the current Mac OS X default, however, if you started using Macs back in the Jaguar days, and have just been upgrading, then you shell might be tcsh, which would not even look at .profile, and trying to run it interactively would generate strange results when interpreted by tcsh.
And of course, it is always possible you intentionally changed your shell. If you did that would be useful information. I suspect you did not, but I figured I would ask.
Yes, I'm using the bash shell. $SHELL returns /bin/bash, and $0 returns -bash.
If your lines end in ^M, then your .profile has been DOS'ified.
Ok, I did the cat command you've suggested. BTW, thanks for the options on the cat command. I didn’t realize cat had options to show special characters. I’ve used it for years and never really looked at the man page on it. I believe there is also a way to see control characters within xemacs, but I can’t remember how to do that.
Anyway, the file is definitely showing ^M characters. My first question is, is ^M the same as <CR><LF>? The reason I ask is it may have been xemacs that put those there, or they may have already been there from the files I transferred from the linux platform. I'm pretty sure xemacs uses ^M's because whatever mode I was able to put xemacs in in the past to see control characters, I'm about 99% sure I've seen all lines ending in that. Of course, that brings me to my next question. If that's true, why do these files work on linux and solaris platforms and not OS X? Like I said, I do most of my editing with xemacs, and I know the environment files were originally created on the other platforms using xemacs.
If you have any ideas on these questions, please enlighten me. In the mean time, I'll play around with trying to get rid of the ^M's to see what happens. Not sure how I'm going to do that though since I'm not that familiar with a lot of other editors, so I wouldn't know how to load the files and remove the invisible ^M characters. I also really do not want to hand type in all my environment files if this turns out to be the problem. And if I use xemacs to perform the editing, then it'll just save the file with ^M's anyway.
Thanks for your help.