'export' command not found on new terminal window - bash

Upon opening a new terminal I will get
-bash: ‘export: command not found
This line will only appear once then my base cmd line reappears.
I have read the other stackoverflow answers that seem similar but for some reason they get the error
-bash: ‘export: command not found
multiple times consecutively rather than just once.
I want to understand why this is appearing and if so what are likely causes. I am currently working on creating a website and had installed some of the requisite things like ruby but I do not know what specifically would have caused this.

The error message shows a U+2018 character ("LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK"), i.e. a "smart quote".
This is likely coming from a .bashrc or .profile that's executed on Bash startup. Look for it next to an utterance of export.
Since it's not a script character (like a normal quote ') Bash is considering it to be part of the command name, and there is indeed no such command as ‘export.

Related

Add Path to OSX to El Capitan

I am trying to learn UNIX.
I am using a book called “Wicked Cool Shell Scripts”.
I am told that .bash_profile contains my login for bash and that I can add paths to it so that commands I enter in Terminal will find the scripts I am writing.
The contents of my current bash_profile is:
export PATH=~/bin:$PATH
When I type echo $PATH I get:
/usr/local/opt/php#7.0/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/X11/bin
I would like to add a path so that - as the book suggests - I can write scripts and refer to them directly from the command line, instead of having to constantly navigate to that directory to run them.
I have a file with a shebang. It runs fine when I type its name and am in the same directory. I have moved that file to the folder scripts, which is located under crg/Users/ (ie: Users/crg/scripts)
According to this book, I can now alter my $PATH to include that directory, so that when I type that filename, the program will run.
I cannot do this successfully.
I don’t know why.
After every edit, I quit terminal and reopen it, to ensure it is using the newly edited bash_profile.
As per the books instructions on page 5, I have tried entering this in my bash_profile:
export PATH=”/Users/crg/scripts/:$PATH”
I save my bash_profile, quit Terminal, reopen it and type echo $Path
This is the result:
”/Users/crg/scripts/:??
This is not right. In fact, it's wildly wrong. And it does not allow me to run scripts from the folder indicated. It also seems to completely overwrite whatever was in the bash_profile before this, so I cannot - after doing this 'simple edit' suggested by a 'professional' - run a php -version command from the Terminal.
I am at a complete loss as to why this is happening.
Why is there a quotation mark at the beginning of this line (but not at the end)?
What's with the colon and the 2 question marks at the end of this line?
How do I add/append a path to my bash_profile?
More questions:
When I try and solve this on my own using “the Internet”, I discover many interesting versions of this ‘simple’ process: Here’s one suggested by a ‘professional’:
export PATH="${PATH}:/path/to/program/inside/package"
This is very different from what the book says...
Here’s another version of ‘how to do it’ by ‘a professional’:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin/modemZapp
Notice that this one doesn’t even have quotes. In both, the PATH variable comes before the actual path.
Why are there so many 'versions' of how to perform this simple task?
Can someone please tell me how to add a path to my .bash_profile?
UPDATE: I have followed the advice here, (add it to etc/paths) but this does not work either.
I get the exact same thing when I type echo $PATH in a new Terminal:
/usr/local/opt/php#7.0/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.6/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.5/bin:/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.3/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr:/usr/local/share/npm/bin:/Users/fhb/scripts:/opt/X11/bin
I can't help but note a comment on that last page: "I have been through at least a dozen different methods for adding directories to $PATH. Why are there so many and why do so few of them work?"
To answer your first question if you look closely your quotes are ” instead of ". I'm guessing you edited either your bash_profile or this post in a rich text editor instead of a plain text one. I would recommend notepad for Windows or nano for *nix if you are writing code. To fix this issue, replace the ” with ".
To answer your second question, bash is quite forgiving and will allow you to set a string variable in multiple different ways, even without quotes. However you can run into issues when a string contains whitespace, for example: /Users/lilHenry/my scripts.
The "${PATH}" syntax is just another way to declare a string. It has the benefit that it allows you to interpolate variables into a string like so:
prefix="foo"
echo "${prefix}bar"
This will output foobar, whereas echo "$prefixbar" will not output anything as the variable prefixbar has not been set. I would suggest sticking with the export PATH="/Users/me/bin:$PATH" syntax.

Ambiguous redirect error while using rtmpdump

So I was trying to download somevideos using rtmpdump, and I used this shell script which is supposed to download the some videos but it gave me and error message saying
./script: line 9: $1: ambiguous redirect
Now I am pretty sure that I am doing something silly so I will tell you exactly what I did. I first downloaded that above file into my system saved it as "script". And opened terminal and typed:
./script
and it gave me the above error.
Now I have also gone through this thread, and also some other threads but they don't seem help me at all and now I have nowhere to go. please save me.
script tries to use $1 as the name of a file for redirection (e.g., someCommand > "$1"), but you didn't supply a an argument when you called script.
The script needs a file as the first parameter which will have one video to download per line

bash "command not found" - is my PATH wrong [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Bash script prints "Command Not Found" on empty lines
(17 answers)
Closed 2 years ago.
I'm using bash for the first time. Wrote a code that is supposed to take "stats" as a command, but whenever I use "stats" in my command lines I kept getting the following error:
bash: stats: command not found
I googled around and a lot of people are saying this error is usually associated with PATH problems. Running "echo $PATH" yields the following results:
/bin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/apps/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/nfs/stak/students/z/myname/bin:.
I made sure my program started with
#!/bin/bash
Is my PATH wrong? If so, how do I fix it? If not, any suggestions on what else I should look into? Thank you all for your time and help.
It might be a PATH problem, it might be a permission problem. Some things to try.
1) If stats is not in your current directory, change directory (cd) to the directory where stats is and do
bash stats
If stats executes correctly, then you know at least that the script is OK. Otherwise, look at the script itself.
2) Try to execute the script with
./stats
If this gives
bash: ./stats: Permission denied
Then you have a permission problem. Do a
chmod a+rx stats
and retry. Note: a+rx is perhaps a bit wide; some may suggest
chmod 755 stats
is a better choice. Hint: from the comments, I see that this is one of your problems.
3) From the name of the directory, I get the impression that the file is on NFS. It might therefore be mounted as 'noexec', meaning that you cannot execute any files from that mount. You might try:
cp stats /tmp
chmod 700 /tmp/stats
/tmp/stats
4) Check the full path name for stats. If you are still in the same directory as stats, try
pwd
Check if this directory is present in the PATH. If not, add it.
export PATH=$PATH:/nfs/stak/students/z/myname/344
and try stats again.
Your PATH looks reasonable. PATH problems are a common source of errors like this, but not the only one.
The error message ": No such file or directory" suggests that the script file has DOS/Windows-style line endings (consisting of a carriage return followed by linefeed) instead of unix-style (just linefeed). Unix programs (including shells) tend to mistake the carriage return for part of the line, causing massive confusion.
In this instance, it sees the shebang line as "#!/bin/bash^M" (where "^M" indicates the carriage return), goes looking for an interpreter named "/bin/bash^M", can't find it, and prints something like "/bin/bash^M: No such file or directory". Since the carriage return makes the terminal return to the beginning of the line, ": No such file or directory" gets printed on top of the "/bin/bash" part, so it's all you see.
If you have the dos2unix program, you can use that to convert to unix-style line endings; if not, there are a variety of alternate conversion tools. But you should also figure out why the file has Windows/DOS format: did you edit it with a Windows editor, or something like that? Whatever caused it, you should make sure it doesn't happen again, because Windows/DOS format files will cause problems with most unix programs.

How can I add a vertical space in 'Terminal' after each command?

I've just started using Terminal (the CLI for Mac OS X).
When I run a command, get some information back, run another command, get more info etc., it is hard (on the eyes) to find a certain point on the screen (e.g. the output for the command before last).
Is there a way of adding a vertical empty space to the end of each output/ after each command is run that has no output?
Each new command that you enter is preceded by a "prompt", and these can be customized (though the exact way to customize depends on the shell). Since you mention Mac OS X I'm assuming you are using the default bash shell, in which case the absolute simplest way to add a blank line is like this: PROMPT_COMMAND=echo. You can run that command to try it out, or add it to a startup file (like .profile in your home folder) to have it done automatically each time.
If you use Bash 4.4 and you want a blank line after your prompt, you could set the PS0 prompt to a newline:
PS0="\n"
Now, this will be inserted every time you run a command:
$ echo "Hello"
Hello
Wondering this too, I've looked at the menu options in Terminal & most of the control characters one can type in and nothing does this on a keystroke. You can however enter an echo command, it alone to leave a single blank line below it before the next prompt. echo \n will add an extra blank line to that, echo \n\n to do 2 extra, ie. 3 blank lines, etc. (you can also do echo;echo;echo getting the same effect)
You can create a shell alias like alias b='echo;echo' (i couldn't seem to get the \n notation to work in a alias), then entering b on a prompt will leave a double-blank line, not bad. Then you gotta figure out how to save aliases in your .profile script.
I tried making an alias for the command ' ' ie. space character, which I though you could type like \ (hmm, stack overflow not formatting this well, that's backslash followed by a space, then return to execute it), but the bash shell doesn't seem to allow an alias with that name. It probably wouldn't allow a function named that either (similar to alias), though I didn't check.
I often use the fish shell, and I found that it does allow a function with that name! Created with function ' '; echo \n; end and indeed it works; at the shell prompt, typing the command \ (again backslash space) leaves a double blank line.
Cool, but.. I tried saving this function using funcsave ' ' (how you save functions in fish, no messing with startup scripts!) and afterwards the function no longer works :^( This is probably a bug in the fish shell. It's in active development right now though, I think I'll report this as a bug since I would kind of like this to work myself.
One could also send Apple a feature request through their bug reporter for an Insert Blank Line menu/keyboard command in Terminal. If someone pays attention to your request it might be implemented in a year maybe.
I wanted to solve exactly the same, and for anyone interested in doing the same, I used what tripleee said in his comment here - I created a .bash_profile (see details here) with the line export PS1="\n\n$ ".
Hopefully that helps someone else too!

Simple shell script doesn't work like command line?

I'm trying to write a script that contains this
screen -S demo -d -m which should start a new screen session named demo and detach it.
Putting screen -S demo -d -m in the command line works.
If I put it in a file named boot.sh, and run it ./boot.sh I get
Error: Unknown option m
Why does this work in the command line but not as a shell script?
This file was transferred from windows and had ctrl-M characters.
Running "screen" on my Linux machine, a bad option (Screen version 4.00.03jw4 (FAU) 2-May-06) gives the error,
Error: Unknown option -z"
while your description includes no dash before the offending option. I'd check that the characters in your script file are what you expect them to be. There are many characters that look like a dash but which are not.
cat -v boot.sh
may show something interesting as it'll show codes for non-ascii characters.
This may seem a little like the "make sure your printer is plugged in" kind of help, but anyway:
have you tried to check if the screen you're invoking from the script is the same as the one invoked from the command line ?
I'm thinking you may change the PATH variable inside your script somewhere and perhaps screen from the script would be something else (a different version, perhaps ?).

Resources