What is wrong with this shell script?

Question

The service for a piece of software I just installed (from a provided .deb file) on a Ubuntu server won't start. When running the service I get the error:

/etc/init.d/matrixsa: 44: Syntax error: "}" unexpected (expecting "fi")

Here is the relevant part of the script. Not being versed in shell scripting I don't know if this is valid:

if [ -f /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions ]
then
    . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
else
    function action {
        echo "$1"
        shift
        $@
    } # <-- this is line 44
    function success {
        echo -n "Success"
    }
    function failure {
        echo -n "Failed"
    }
fi

Answer 1

$@ could contain anything, even things which make your function suddenly syntactically invalid. Quote it instead. Here is a less breakable version of the script:

if [ -f /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions ]; then
    . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions
else
    action() {
        printf '%s\n' "$1"
        shift
        "$@"
    }
    success() { printf Success ; }
    failure() { printf Failed ; }
fi

If you are using bash or similar, you could use the following as the action function:

action() {
    printf '%s\n' "$1"
    "${@:2}"
}

If it is important that it splits on IFS like the original script (it probably isn't), unquote $@.

It's also possible that you're running this in a non-bash shell. function is a bashism, use func() instead.